Hi! My name is James Kevin Ty. My interest are astronomy, photography and travels. I started astronomy when I was still 11 years old. Between that time to around 1982, I settled to learning the constellations, planets and the Moon using a pair of opera glass. A year later, I saved a little money to buy myself a cheap 20x50 refractor. With this scope, I viewed only the Moon and the bright stars. Eventually, I discover how bad chromatic aberration ruin the image. I then urged my father to buy me a pair of 16x50 binoculars and I used this to further observe the bright star clusters and nebula.
During the year 1985, I joined the Philippine Astronomical Society and during that time, Comet Halley was around to keep us busy. I then bought a 50mm f/16 refractor on an altazimuth mount and was very excited to view the night sky. When I turn the scope to the planet Saturn, I was very delighted to see this ringed planet! Although the view was only 100x, the small image of this planet had forever etched into my mind. Next comes the famous M42, the Great Orion Nebula, in the constellation of Orion. I was disappointed to know that there was no color in this nebula! I thought that my scope was damaged as it was not showing me what I saw in my astro books. I learned later that the photos in the books were taken with film, which is more sensitive than our naked eye to capture the colors.
During my early stage being a member of our society,
Edwin Aguirre and Imelda Joson had taught me to be serious in this field and I really thank them for it. Both of them are now residing in the U.S. and are working in the Sky & Telescope magazine as associate editor and photo editor respectively. I also met Jun Lao and he gave me some ideas on how to photograph the stars, thus saved me a lot of time to start from scratch. I later developed my skills in astrophotography and had been shooting deep sky objects, comets, planets, eclipses, etc. when the weather is clear during weekends. After observing the total solar eclipse in General Santos , Cotabato last March 18, 1988, I got hooked to observing more solar eclipse in which I was able to leads several PAS eclipse expeditions in 1995 at Khon Buri, Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand; 1997 at Darhan, Mongolia; 1998 at Pulau Dayang, Malaysia and 1999 in Stuttgart, Germany.In August 1998, I was able to help set up the PAS webpage which aims to give more needed exposure for our society not only nationally but internationally as well. A month later, the PAS Mailing List was established to help members get more informations in astronomy related topics and also give members the chance to discuss matters concerning astronomy and space. With these developments, the PAS awarded me the Padre Faura Astronomy Medal Award in the year 2000. More things are in store for him like setting up a webcam page to webcast live events such as conjunctions, solar and lunar eclipses, etc.
