who I am


	Fred’s Astronomy.


	Who I am

As a newbie

I have started my life of amateur astronomer in 1986. When I bought my first telescope a 115/900. It has been by only telescope from the age of 11 to 28

First serious telescope

My first serious telescope was a Mizar 100/600 on AR-2 Mount. With this telescope I have seen my first total solar eclipse in France. The Mizar had a good optic and its mount was well adapted for the reflector. Of course the mount was not a goto one. Mizar has produced very nice telescope and mount, unfortunately it is now defunct.

TP2415H and AP Traveler

In 1999 I bought a Traveler. I started to mount it on the AR-2. But this mount was not adapted to this mount. Few mount latter I bought a GP-DX from Vixen, and when the Skysensor 2000 was available I bought one for this mount. After a while with a friend, we acquired a home made hyper-sensibilisation kit. Fortunately, my mum did not know that I had Hydrogen-Helium mix at home. And more fortunately, I had not accident, even so, there were some leaks in the kit, and the process last for more than 24h.

First CCD time

When my last TP2415 film was exposed, I had no other solution than moving to CCD At that time, they were few CCD Camera available, I select the HX516 from Starlight Xpress. This camera had an ICX-098 chip (predecessor of the ICX-424), And the transfert to the PC was performed with parallel port at a very high speed ;-)

More CCD

After a few years with HX516, I have changed to a MX716 This camera is equipped with an ICX-429, with 752 x 580 pixel, compared with the VGA size HX516 this is an improvement. The response in H-Alpha is also better as well as the capacity.

New CCDs

After several years of reduced activity, I moved to more sensitive camera that better fit Traveler focal length .