About Me
My name is Sean Grider and I became interested in astronomy, like most people, as a child. My first telescope was a celestron C90 Mak. My parents bought it for me from a local who was selling some of his older equipment. Unofortunatley, I didn't know anything about telescopes at the time and I didn't even get a mount, let alone a tripod with it. Later on, a friend gave me a free alt-az tripod, one of those 5 dollars you can find on ebay.
I still remember how frustrating it was to fight with the head trying to get it to move smoothly to center the moon only to have it drift out in a couple of minutes. The whole experience was completely irritating. Before I loss my interest in fighting tripods, I luckily happened to glance a slight fuzzy patch in the sky (lots of light pollution) and started to line it up in my scope. I'll never forget the "wow" I thought to myself when I discovered that this fuzzy patch was TONS of stars that I couldn't even make out with my eyes. It was exciting to think that I had just seen something that not many people even knew existed because they couldn't see it themselves. Although my interest in astronomy faded, for years I kept wondering what it was I had seen and I finally found out later when my interested returned, that it had been the pleiades.
Early in 2007 I really became interested in astronomy again. It was more out of surfing the web looking at photography sites that I came across a new word, "Astrophotography". It seemed so simple to combine the two fields and all of a sudden. Now I've realized that there really is nothing simple about astrophotography. I'm still exposing my images unguided and I have yet to attempt a drift alignment, but I am getting better.
The images I've posted here are the results of only about 10 to 12 outings, including the ones where I became familiar with my scope. Some of the images are not great, but I figured I'd post them, if nothing else, at least to track my own progress.
Feel free to look at my images, link to them, download them, laugh at them or whatever. If you have any questions for me or would like to contact me, feel free to drop me an email at sean.grider@gmail.com