This is me a while back standing at the telescopes in my then  four year old observatory. The open door on the left leads into a warm room which has a window that looks out to the telescope. The warm room had two computer monitors, one for finding astronomical targets to photograph and another dedicated to star tracking.

This is a great hobby, if you’re willing to spend the hours of time involved in actually getting decent astrophotos. My record imaging time was about 70 hours for one image taken over multiple nights.

I’m more interested now in writing stories that take place in the outer space I used to photograph but I’m sure that some day I’ll be back at it, spending long hours in the middle of the night enjoying this fascinating hobby.

I wonder how many amateur astronomers, or professional astronomers for that matter, are science fiction writers as well? A couple of famous SF writers who enjoyed amateur astronomy are Robert Sawyer and Terry Pratchett. And, of course, one professional astronomer and cosmologist was Carl Sagan. Not bad company to keep.