I have been in Powerplant engineering field for 29 going on 30 years now in operations and management. My background is in Maritime and Plant Facility engineering. I am also military brat, my father served 29 years in Army, retiring in 1992 as Full Colonel. Spent many years traveling the states and overseas.

I have been avid computer user since 1978. I have a side business building custom computer systems aimed at video editors and CPU intensive tasks such as my other hobby astronomy. I am just recently getting into CNC work with router and eventually plasma cutter. Woodworking is my other hobby for past 10 years plus.

I built my own 10ft diameter and 12 ft. tall robotic observatory back in 2010. The observatory features several telescopes up to 12" and fully robotic control for imaging sessions. The observatory used a variety of cameras for imaging even built my own from webcam in the start. The observatory featured my own home made security setup when build was completed.

I have always been fascinated with computer applications for controlling hardware, the observatory project was incredibly satisfying, I am self taught at astrophotography which requires one to learn setting up of hardware, alignment, and camera systems. The hard part is learning how to process the raw data. Once one is competent with about 12 pieces of software commonly used astrophotography becomes quite obsessive and rewarding. In recent years and future you will have to learn streak removal from imaging, downside of hobby these days and getting worse fast, this soon will be a regular part of processing just running a simple filter during processing to remove the satellite streaks.