Happy New Year from All About Astro.com

Jan 5, 2004

It has been a great 2003, but it’s over! I would like to take the opportunity to wish all my family, friends, and astro lovers my best wishes for the new year. For me, 2004 promises to be quite prolific. The number and quality of my images are certain to rise, as is the number of events that I attend. I will be a regular fixture at the Copperbreaks StarWalks during the 2004 season. I’m also pre-registered for yet another Texas Star Party, coming in mid-May. There are many items on my wish list, such as a larger CCD camera, and perhaps 2004 will be the year!

It’s been a terrific holiday season for me, having two weeks of vacation time. That allowed me to spend 6 quality nights under the stars with the Celestron CGE mount and Tak 106. I fixed many problems (due mostly to the young mount exhibiting some growing pains). This, coupled with the acquisition of the new CFW-8a color filter wheel, allowed me to take some of my best ever CCD images. Be sure to look through the Gallery pages as I’ve posted some images that didn’t make my front page. The Messier list and Images by Date list are new features for All About Astro.com. Make sure you look through them often so that you don’t miss any images. Likewise, even though there are many “blanks” in the Messier list, stay tuned as I hope to fill in those blanks during the 2004 season.  My hope is to have some decent images of all Messier objects sooner rather than later, at which point I’ll slowly replace the older images with images of better quality. It takes time and experience, but I’m getting there. CCDs are wonderful things!