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New Member - Gary Burk - astrophotography and spectroscopy

garyburk

By garyburk
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garyburk

garyburk

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Greetings all,

   I've been interested in amatuer astro-imaging for several years and have just built an observatory at 2300meters altitude in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  I retired as a physicist when my employer left the US and then taught Astronomy at Otterbein University in central Ohio.  My interests are more aligned to astrophysics and trying to keep my equipment working then to learning the sky map (I have a few PC programs that know precisely where millions of objects are  ☺).   
  Equipment is an AP1200 mount, SBIG ST10 camera, PlainWave 12.5" CDK scope, Tak FSQ106 scope, Celestron C14 for spectroscopy, Losmandy G11 mount with Gemini control for a "grab-n-go" portable and, most recently, a Canon T3i with extended IR cutoff filter to improve its response at the Halpha wavelength.
  I moved to this mountain two years ago and expected to be in operation by now, but had not properly accounted for priority projects assigned by She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  Now that house, barn, corrals, pastures, and pond is built and populated with hungry horses, donkeys, cats, dogs and chickens I am permitted to use some free time to put the observatory on-line.

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garyburk

garyburk

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Gary,

Always glad to hear from new members, especially one's with an interest in spectroscopy.....

What spectroscopes do you use?

Any particular area of interest?

Hi Merlin,

   I've been using an SBIG self guiding spectrograph with an old SBIG ST8 camera.   So far I've really only tried

to match known data to learn how to best use the instrument.  I was primarily a near-IR spectroscopist in my career, designing

non-contacting sensors for industrial control processes and guidance systems.   

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garyburk

garyburk

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Hi Gary and welcome to the forum

Clear skies

James

Thanks for the greetings everyone!    I still need to run power to my dome, about 300 meters away from the house. Making that difficult,  much of the soil is shallow with granite bedrock that require blasting to bury the wires;  plus the sub-zero F weather right now  ( <20C ). I'm aiming for springtime, which at this altitude and latitude occurs in late May.

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SnakeyJ

SnakeyJ

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Welcome to SGL Gary from the other side of the pond. Quite a setup there to keep you busy for many years to come and some real challenges in connecting and servicing that observatory - sounds a lot of fun.

Will look forward to future updates and hopefully some wonderful pictures/data as you come on line.

Roll on Spring!

typed on my mobile with Tapatalk

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