jpoh

Thank you all! Glad to be here.

Thank you! Yes, I was living in Australia at the time, unfortunately didn't get out to the Outback, and my skill level was pretty low at the time and barely knew what I was doing. Now I can't wait to go back with some decent gear (if I can fly with it, or have to borrow/rent stuff over there)!

Hi SGL folks! A quick introduction about myself. Been a long-time lurker and browsing articles and posts on this forum which has been invaluable, but I figured it's time to start engaging. I was a software developer working for a fairly well known Australian tech company in Sydney, when I started dabbling in astrophotography, and I stumbled across the Carina nebula in one of my long-exposure night shots about 6-7 years ago. With the help of a friend (Dylan, on YouTube) who took my photo and did a bit of stretching and showed me what was in it, I was hooked. However, life got in the way and I had to put a pause on AP and photography in general for a while. I've since left that job and that industry, now living in Portugal and pursuing photography as a career, and only recently in the past year or so had the means and interest to pick up astrophotography again. I've since acquired an a Star Adventurer GTI mount (quite an upgrade from my dinky little iOptron SkyTracker, the old one, not the 'Pro' version), an astro-modded Canon 6D, paired with a few old Canon lenses I got from dad including a 100-400mm telephoto zoom, which has been my main 'telescope' for imaging lately. I'm currently going back and forth between wide angle landscape astro/Milky Way and DSO, and learning the different processing techniques, and have been devouring tutorials, going from Photoshop/Lightroom to Siril and now in the past couple weeks, PixInsight. I'm trying to pace myself and making the most of the equipment I've got. I know this hobby can get very expensive, very quickly! 😉 Currently I think I still need to work on my processing side more before I hit the limits of my equipment (though polar alignment and guiding is still a pain to get right). I'm lucky that I've found a small group of local astrophotographers, and that we go out to a dark(-ish, Bortle 4) sky site every once in a while and I've been learning a fair bit from them, nothing beats hands-on. I still feel like an utter newbie at this and there's so much to learn, both on the hardware and the software side. Here's a couple of my most recent shots that I'm most proud of.