I've already had the pleasure of meeting a few members of IIS at the Takahashi Star Party last weekend. It was absolutely great, so many great people and not to mention telescopes!
Just wanted to say hi in here as well and introduce myself to the rest of the forums, where I will undoubtedly spend some time while I'm in Australia.
I'm an astrophotographer and amateur astronomer from the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic Sea. This is a very cloudy region of the world, with a long bright summer, but occasionally we get Northern Lights and even clear skies!
It's 3 years since I bought my first telescope, a 5" dobsonian that I still use regularly. I took up astrophotography almost right away with the dob, first by doing simple stuff like making an adapter so I could put my smartphone up to the eyepiece to photograph the Moon, like many people start out with, and then moving to using dslr on a 8" Newtonian with tracking & later autoguiding. I'm still learning a lot about astrophotography all the time and I enjoy it a lot.
I like doing deep sky, planetary, white light solar and just recently I bought a Lunt 50mm Ha scope, so I'm going to be doing a lot more Ha imaging when I go back home to the Faroes, (only taken 1 image so far,) it'll be good for those long bright summer months!
I also like doing night timelapse, daytime stuff and sunrises/sunsets.
I came to Australia after traveling South East Asia for 3 months, I went to Indonesia in March for the Total Solar Eclipse and managed to view and image it from an island called Mare, close to the volcanic island of Tidore. I'm pretty pleased about that trip, as last year when the Total Solar Eclipse of 2015 was back at home in the Faroes, it was almost completely clouded over at my location and I had zero opportunity to image it.
There are pictures from the solar eclipse trip & the Takahashi Star Party on my
FB page if anyone is interested.
For my trip to Australia I brought a mobile tracker and 2 cameras (well 3 if you count my GoPro) and a few camera lenses. I've already got a lot of use out of them, I got to do a Milky Way Center sequence last weekend at the Takahashi Star Party, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time, that was really awesome. Lately I'm practicing doing polar alignment on my SW Star Adventurer to the SCP, I got close the other night, but I'm still not happy with the tracking, it's much more difficult without Polaris, but I'm sure I'll have it sorted soon. I have managed to do some 5 minute exposures on my Star Adventurer at 200mm when it was polar aligned really well, so I'd like to get close to that performance again.
I'm going to be attending the South Pacific Star Party in May, it will probably be the highlight of my trip, looking forward to it. Might see some of you there!