Welcome to the weblog for Alberts-Astro. This blog is meant to share my astrophotography experiences along with information about basic processes, notes on equipment, good and bad experiences, and so on. Hopefully, the articles here will be helpful and interesting. Please feel free to comment on any of the information presented.
By the way I’m Alan Tuttle. I have an engineering background and and became interested in astrophotography a few years after I retired.
I know it’s odd, but the website name doesn’t reflect my name but rather a Cavalier Spaniel, Albert. Albert was our first Cavalier Spaniel and we loved him dearly. He was with us at the time when I started with astrophotography and was always underfoot (🐕 in the dark ) while I did astronomy stuff. He became a big part of our lives but sadly he passed in 2010 about the time I started this site….. So, he gets remembered in the website name.
Who knows why I took up astronomy in a place with as many cloudy nights as the Pacific Northwest (well now, we’ve moved to Wenatchee in North Central Washington). I started in mid-2007 when my sister lent me her orange tube, fork mounted, 8″ Celestron SCT so I could tinker a bit with taking some deep space pictures. That effort totally failed, but it got me exposed to the challenges and rewards of deep space photography. There are many technical details to explore and work through, and lot’s of problems/projects to take on. For me, being a retired mechanical engineer, it’s like being a kid in a candy store.
Over the years, I’ve ended up with several scopes, cameras, and mounts, bought property, and built a roll-off roof observatory. I’ve concluded this hobby can be as expensive as you let it.
These pages will show the better images I’ve been able to capture and will hopefully show improvement as I learn more and build some experience. There are also pages giving some helpful links, some introductory processing examples, and observing areas around Wenatchee.
This blog used to be just a comment section for some up-front webpage(s) but I’ve recently moved almost everything astronomy related over to this blog. Plus, I finally brought the image gallery mostly up to date and transferred it here. Be sure to check out the Astrophotography Galleries.
One last thing, I want to give a nod to my (long passed) maternal grandfather Philip Fox, who among other things was deeply involved in astronomy. Worked with Hale at Yerkes and was published in the Astrophysical Journal, headed the Alder Planetarium in Chicago and for a short time at the Griffith Observatory in Glendale CA.
Philip at the scope. I believe it’s where he taught Astronomy at North Western Univ.
If interested there is more info on the Wiki Page
And there is more genealogy Here.
Anyway, I hope you find the info in the blog useful and enjoy the photo galleries. Again, please feel free to comment or provide correction on any of the articles presented.
Clear Skies!!
al