Mars

This was the first image from a brand new Celestron EdgeHD 1100 (C11) Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. It's the first picture I ever took with any kind of tracking, and it's pretty awful. It's just barely good enough to be able to tell that it's actually Mars. My friend Nic Patridge was instrumental in helping to get this telescope going and was involved in every step of getting this image. Again, it's not a great picture of Mars, but at the time I was astonished that we could get Mars in view and capture this. Astrophotography still astonishes me every day these five years later.

Having a C11 as your first real telescope is not something I would recommend. There were so many frustrating nights dealing with the complexities of such a large rig. I should have gone with a small refractor to start out with. And that was originally my intent. But COVID was in full swing so I decided to take on a significant challenge to help pass the evenings where we were stuck at home.