This all started in 2005, when I bought a goto telescope to my son - a Newtonian. Coming from an interest in the stories around Greek mythology he regularly wanted to go out and look at the constellations. My idea was to nurture his newfound interest in the stars. As it turned out it was my old interest in the universe that awoke again.

I looked at the moon thru this telescope and thought - Hey, lets try to take an image. I did not have a camera, but I took my mobile phone (old Ericsson model) and took an image. Quite blurry from handshaking but still not that bad (at least from my point of view then).

I quickly got hold of a point and shot camera and tried to do the same thing, but I was never able to make the image sharp. I tried all sorts of things to make the set up more stable, but always with the same result - a not so sharp moon image.

I did not give up thou. This was the age of the internet so I surfed out and googled until I sweated. What I found out was a complete surprise - there was a whole community of astrophotographers out there, sharing ideas and answering questions (even dumb ones :-)

So I took a deep breath and started asking. It turned out that my scope had a barlow lens in the focuser and that lens is not apochromatic. There is no way one can get focus in all three colours at the same time.

At this time I got a lot of help from people in the Yahoo Digital Astro group. One person in particular - Tony Gondola - helped me to understand that the most important part of my set-up was not the telescope tube, but the motor that makes it all possible - the mount.  Thanks Tony!

Since then it has all been a joyful journey of learning and today I know enough to understand that the way I started out is not the optimum one - at least not if one want to have an easy start.

What about my son? He has changed the constellations for genetics:-)

BR
Matts