Learn more about my astrophotography journey

My fascination with the night sky began quietly.

When I was in primary school, I watched my first lunar eclipse together with my grandmother. It was a cold, silent winter night, and we observed it from the balcony of our second-floor apartment. That moment stayed with me.

Not long after, using old eyeglass lenses my grandparents no longer needed, I built my first simple telescope from cardboard tubes. It resembled something Galileo might have used. I pointed it at the Moon and was completely captivated by the details I could suddenly see.

A defining moment came on August 11, 1999, during the total solar eclipse. Living in Romania at the time, I was fortunate enough to experience it firsthand — an event that deeply reinforced my connection with astronomy.

First steps into astrophotography

Years later, in 2011, I took my first lunar photographs using a Nikon D90 and a 300 mm lens. Photography was already a hobby of mine, and naturally I wanted to capture what I was observing.

In the winter of 2015, I came across an online ad for a small Optus 76/700 Newtonian telescope, priced at about €40. I bought it out of curiosity — and it completely blew me away.
The Moon’s surface, Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons, and my first view of the Orion Nebula were all unforgettable experiences.

I immediately fell down the astrophotography rabbit hole: figuring out how to mount a DSLR to a telescope, experimenting with adapters, and even converting a webcam into a planetary camera. I wanted to preserve and share the beauty I was seeing.

Growing with the equipment — and the sky

In 2014, I moved from Romania to Budapest, Hungary. Around that time, I decided to upgrade seriously and purchased a SkyWatcher Explorer 200/1000 on an EQ5 mount.

As I started exploring deep-sky objects (DSOs), I learned quickly that photographing faint nebulae and galaxies requires long exposures and precise tracking. To achieve this, I motorized the mount on both axes (RA and DEC), enabling longer and more accurate imaging sessions.

I moved to Belgium in 2016, where I encountered new challenges: fewer clear nights and significantly higher light pollution compared to Romania and Hungary. I began traveling to darker areas shown on light-pollution maps, often spending long, freezing nights in open fields with my equipment.

To maximize limited clear skies, I captured multiple targets per night — a trade-off that allowed variety, but often limited total integration time.

Pushing technical boundaries

At some point, I hit the limits of stock DSLR astrophotography, especially for hydrogen-alpha-rich targets like the Horsehead Nebula. To overcome this, I bought a Canon EOS 450D and heavily modified it: removing the IR/UV filter, rehousing the sensor, and adding Peltier cooling to reduce noise during long exposures. This opened entirely new horizons.

Later upgrades followed naturally:

  • An EQ6-R Pro mount with belt drives for improved precision

  • A dedicated cooled astro camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro

  • A SkyWatcher StarTravel 102/500 refractor for wide-field imaging

However, setting up everything in the field — polar alignment, guiding, cabling — consumed a lot of time. I started dreaming of a permanent setup.

A dream realized: my backyard observatory (the observatory era)

In 2021, we moved from renting into our own house, and in 2023, that dream became reality: I built a permanent observatory in my backyard.

For the first time, astrophotography became effortless. The entire system is now automated — I can begin an imaging session in about five minutes.

With a stable, automated platform, upgrades finally felt cumulative rather than logistical:

  • in 2024 I added an Omegon 254/1016 f/4 astrograph, and the jump in light-gathering power was mind-blowing.
  • In 2026, a ZWO Seestar S50 joined the kit — a compact, app-controlled smart telescope at the opposite end of the spectrum, perfect for spontaneous sessions or introducing others to the night sky.

Looking ahead

This website documents that journey — the experiments, the learning curve, and the gradual refinement over time. As you scroll through the timeline, you are literally moving backward through my evolution as an astrophotographer.

Looking forward, I aim to:

  • Register my observatory and obtain an MPC observatory code (allowing observations to contribute to official minor-planet and asteroid research)

  • Participate in scientific and collaborative astronomy projects

  • Organize observation sessions for local schoolchildren, helping them experience major astronomical events and discover the night sky firsthand

The sky has been a long-term companion in my life — and this is my way of sharing that journey.

If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to email me at [email protected]