54 ASTRONOMY • DECEMBER 2018
about performing maintenance on a vari-
ety of scopes. Through doing this, I’ve met
some remarkable people.
One of these people is Stan Watson from
Stellar Winds Observatory (SWO) at DSNM.
We became friends while I was doing some
maintenance at his facility. Now I’m also a
part of the team there. These days, I do
most of my imaging using SWO’s 24- and
17-inch scopes. Recently, three images I
took with these scopes were short-listed in
the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the
Ye a r c o nt e s t i n L o n d o n.
Science, too?
Amateur astronomers can definitely con-
tribute to science. After all, you never
know what will end up in your images.
In 2014, I was approached by David
Martinez-Delgado, a Spanish astrophysicist
working on the Stellar Tidal Stream Survey
at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
in Heidelberg, Germany. He saw some-
thing in my data that he hadn’t seen before
and asked if I would share it with him. It
was a newly discovered stellar stream in a
nearby spiral galaxy, NGC 3628. Now Icollaborate with him regularly by receiving
specific targets to image so that data can
be included in his group’s research papers.
I have really started to enjoy this aspect
of imaging. Whenever I image a new
stream target, I have a hard time sleeping
until I get those first 10 frames back and
can take a peek at them.
While I image from DSNM, I am also
a part of Sierra Remote Observatories in
San Jose, California, and Star Shadows
Remote Observatory in Chile. You can
never have too much data, and imaging56
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