My interest in astronomy goes back many, many years. For almost as long as
I can remember, I have been reading about, and been fascinated with, space
and its exploration. In fact, when I graduated from high school, I could not
decide whether to study aerospace engineering or astronomy at university (aero
won out).
Back in high school, I built a telescope (an 8" Newtonian), and I still use a variation of it today. It was "archived" for quite a few years as my interests and life wandered, but the ember was always there waiting to be reignited. Most recently, I built a Dobsonian mount for it and it has made the scope a joy to use for visual astronomy, which is pretty much all I do right now. Astrophotography has always been a keen interest area as well, but right now I don't have the cash or time to do it right. I am also strongly leaning to getting a more modern scope, partly to aid in the astrophotography front, but also because I want to explore the more esoteric regions of amateur astronomy, like spectrometry, to push the limits of what amateurs can do and (here is my dream) to make some significant contribution.
One current and ongoing project is to visually observe the entire Messier list. I am keeping track of what I have seen using this excellent "Ultimate Messier Object Log", from David Paul Green. Since I don't have a Mac, I am not using the software part, but the PDF version prints out nicely, and works well beside the scope on the dock at one in the morning.
Another project involves mining the vast amount of data collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), whose link you can find at left. This project will enable astronomers throughout the world to have access to high-quality data, enabling them to do research without necessarily having direct access to research-class telescopes. Initially, to get a sense of the data and how to access it, I am working on measuring the Hubble Constant by creating Hubble diagrams for different ranges of redshifts. The main project page is here.
My desktop wallpaper is almost always from the visually stunning Hubble Heritage project.
Copyright © 2003, 2004, Tom Otvos