Today we would like to introduce you to the astrophotographer Andreas Zirke. He has built himself a very special telescope.

Hi Andreas, it's great to have you with us in our series. How did you get into this hobby?

I've been fascinated by astronomy for over 30 years now. I had a few books back then, but I only ever looked at the sky with my naked eye and binoculars. A few years later, I was able to buy my first telescope, a Vixen RS114 reflector. With that, I could observe the planets, the moon, and bright nebulae. It was quite remarkable. I even made my first attempts at photographing the moon with an analog camera, although that remained a one-off. I think it was 2012 when I finally bought an EQ6 mount with a 10" f/4 Newtonian telescope. That's when I started experimenting with digital astrophotography.

Of course, I kept buying and selling more equipment. Several refractor telescopes, various CCD cameras, and reflector telescopes. In between, I even built a small roll-off roof shed in the garden so I wouldn't have to keep setting up and taking down all my gear. It all worked out very well because I was constantly optimizing and building a lot of things myself. Eventually, I got hooked on a Takahashi 130D. This fine piece of equipment wasn't going to be my only purchase; I ended up with two more. I used all three of them with three Atik One 9.0 CCD cameras until recently. It was a very good combination, and I had put a lot of work into optimizing the equipment. With this setup, I was able to photograph many newly discovered nebulae, even for our North German standards, for Marcel Drechsler. The exposure times sometimes exceeded... 100 hours per image. That's really hard work, photographing through many nights.

I have the three Epsilon 130D cameras on an EQ8 mount. Three new cameras were added last year. A slightly larger chip with higher resolution, which doesn't make collimation any easier with three devices. A little fine-tuning still needs to be done. The first images have already been taken, though. I hope to be fully up and running with the equipment again by autumn.

Clear skies, Andreas

Here's a very special video. "Hallo Niedersachsen" visited Andreas and presents his telescope:

https://www.ardmediathek.de/.../Y3JpZDovL25kci5kZS8yOTAwO...