Welcome to the official blog of Siskiyou Skies Observatory! I thought I'd begin this journey with my story. How my astronomy obsession began. Prepare to be bored by the mundane details of my nerddom.
I was a geeky kid (even more so as an adult). I had many hobbies and dove in deep with each of them. The first that I can remember was horticulture. I read all my grandma's gardening books, hung out at the nursery, and even had my dad build me a greenhouse. I've also always had an interest in reptiles (particularly snakes). For a while, I became obsessed with marine biology. In late junior high our family moved to Oregon. We lived in a rural area with pretty dark skies (at least compared to where we moved from). Science and mathematics had always interested me, so astronomy was easy to fall in love with.
I started with a friend of the family's 4" newtonian reflector. It wasn't much, but with it I could easily see Jupiter's moons and cloud bands, Saturn's rings, and some of the brighter deep sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, clusters, etc.) I started subscribing to Astronomy magazine and used its monthly charts to learn my way around the night sky.
A year or two later, my dad bought me my first telescope: a Meade 8" SCT. It had a tracking mount, a controller for precision movement, and seemed absolutely massive at the time. The possibilities were endless!
Around that time I also started spending a lot of time outdoors in the Oregon Cascades. This led to the start of my other "lifetime" hobby: photography. My dad let me have is old Olympus OM-1 film camera and I started capturing the natural world on film. Of course, as soon as I had a camera, I wanted to hook it up to my scope and shoot the night sky!
If you've tried astrophotography, especially before digital cameras were readily available, you'll know that it can be difficult and frustrating. Back then it took some serious dedication to capture a decent image of the night sky, particularly if you were shooting at longer focal lengths. I started with just the camera on a tripod. I even captured some shots of comet Hale-Bopp that I was happy with! However, I wanted to get closer with my night sky photography.
I purchased a piggy back mount for telescope to go the next level. This allows the camera to be mounted on top of the scope so that it can track the night sky while shooting long exposures. (That's one of the biggest difficulties with deep sky photography: you're shooting a subject that requires very long exposures and it's constantly moving!) Through a display of dedication and obsession that I still can't believe I had, I spent many nights manually guiding 45-minute long exposures. (The mount that I had was not accurate enough to not blur the stars over 45 minutes, so I had to watch a star in the main scope with a reticle eyepiece while manually issuing corrections with the control pad.)
Towards the end of high school, I discovered another hobby (as if I needed another!). That was computer programming. I loved being able to create complex visuals or interactions using nothing more than relatively simple instructions. So, I spent many many hours programming various types of physics simulations, mathematical function plotting programs, and fun visualizations. (Did I already mention how much of a nerd I am?) I really enjoyed playing video games too, so it was only natural that I would try and make some simple games as well. Probably my favorite program that I wrote during this time was a 2D n-body gravity simulator that I used to model spiral galaxies. I would initialize it with two galaxies, each a uniform disk with thousands of stars, and run the simulation. I was completely blown away the first time I ran it and these galaxies interacted with each other and formed tidal spiral arms, just like they do in the real universe!
That sealed the deal, I was going to college to one day become a professional astronomer. First step: study physics and math and get my bachelors degree. I went to a school that had a couple of researchers that specialized in astrophysics on staff. This gave me opportunities to participate in their research and get a real taste for academic astronomy. Ironically, my astronomy hobby pretty much stayed in the box along with my telescope during this time. Didn't really fit in the dorm closet!
The summer before my senior year, I applied to join an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program to do some "real" astronomy. I was accepted into the program and worked at the Nautical Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona for the summer. It was so cool to drive to the top of a mountain with massive observatory domes for work every day! I spent the summer studying and simulating gravitational lensing. Specifically, gravitational micro lensing. This is a phenomenon where a background star is lensed by a relatively small body in our galaxy causing the background star to brighten slightly. The brightness curve of these events is very distinctive and can be used to gather some information about the lensing body. My job was to create a computer program that could take light curve measurements and determine some of the characteristics of the lensing body; primarily mass and distance.
That experience helped me get accepted into the astrophysics Ph.D. program at the University of Washington in Seattle. This is where things took a turn. After going to orientation, I came to a realization that the world of academia was not for me. I really loved writing software, and making a career out of that would allow me to live where I wanted and probably make more money too (obviously, money isn't everything, but astrophotography is an expensive hobby!) So, I dropped out of the graduate program and started working for a small company writing simulations and visualizations. More recently I've moved on to a developer position on the Camera Raw team at Adobe. Helping build the tools that I've used for years as a photographer is truly a dream job and I couldn't be happier!
Back to astronomy though... I now live in rural Southern Oregon and have 5 acres and fairly dark skies. So, of course, it's time to build an observatory! We live right up against the Siskiyou Mountains, so I've dubbed the observatory Siskiyou Skies. Check back soon for some more info on the observatory. It's currently under construction and will hopefully be put into service this fall :-)