My first
WOW moment was whilst on a camping trip in the South West of Western Australia with my son at a place called Meelup Beach. We were in my parents campervan and a very rough storm raged for some time then suddenly stopped and we stepped outside ... looked up and were stunned by a sky full of sparkling stars ... I had never seen such a display.
A couple of years later I had a photography gallery in Fremantle and had many hours to sit and read ... a friend loaned me a couple of astro magazines to pass the time and I was blown away by the images of the cosmos. Another shop keeper told me he had a 114mm Tasco Newtonian telescope that he never used and I was welcome to borrow. That started the fascination and once I saw the rings of Saturn through this shaky scope I was hooked.
Within a month I had bought a 200mm Skywatcher Newtonian on an EQ5 mount and was constantly out in my backyard trying to find new objects ... Omega Centauri was one of my favourites with it's tight ball of glistening gems and ofcourse the moon always got a viewing.
I then bought a Meade DSX 90AT Maksutov-Cassegrain with gotto from a guy in the US off ebay. It took three months to arrive but was well worth the wait. I learned a lot from the #497 controller, it has a wealth of information stored in it. I still think it's better than crappy SynScan and wish that SkyWatcher would get their act together to come up with software similar to Meade's ( sorry it's one of my peeves ).
A year or so later I bought a SkyWatcher 254mm Newtonian and an EQ6 Pro mount which enabled me to take images with my Canon 350D DSLR of objects other than the moon and bright star clusters ... Deep Sky objects were beckoning and I needed auto guiding to go to the next level. Oh ... I also bought a SkyWatcher 180mm Mak Pro just because it looked so spunky
and I was flush with dollars.
Today I am living in a dark sky location with my own split roof observatory and an SBIG ST2000XCM astro ccd camera mounted on my William Optics FLT110 F7 Triplet Apochromatic Refractor. I still have all my other scopes and will use them again one day ... honest.
To think that all this started with a storm at Meelup Beach and then some borrowed magazines etc .... once you're hooked you're hooked
I think I have waffled enough .... clear skies everyone !
