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My name is Barry Wakelin, I am 37, Technical Director for an IT company and live in Hampshire, England. I enjoy a relatively dark sky site, certainly one of the less light polluted regions of southern England. On a clear night I can see with the naked eye the great expanse of the Milky Way and can see M31 The Great Andromeda Galaxy, The Double Cluster in Perseus, M44 The Beehive Cluster and M42 The Great Orion Nebula. I'd estimate the sky offers around magnitude 6 visibility on a good night and on a very good night in September 2002 I convinced myself I could see mag 7.3 M27! Unfortunately my view south is somewhat restricted near the horizon due to trees which means I have yet to really enjoy the splendours of Sagittarius or Scorpio.

I have been an amateur astronomer since April 2002. Not long, and in that time I've experienced both the pleasures and frustrations of astronomy for beginners. I bought a Meade ETX70 to see if I would find the hobby interesting and was soon hooked despite the obvious limitations of the telescope. I was soon on the upgrade trail and bought an Intes Micro MN66 152mm f/6 Makstuov-Newtonian mounted on an EQ5 mount. The MN66 was an enormous improvement but the move to a manually guided mount was both positive and negative. For three months I struggled to find anything more than the most obvious objects. During this time I became very frustrated but one day I suddenly discovered that I had learnt the sky in much more detail and found I could actually swing the scope round to within a reasonable distance of most objects. Now I was getting real enjoyment from the instrument and decided to upgrade the mount to a Losmandy GM8 which was significantly more sturdy, accurate and generally easier to use.

At this point I decided to try some simple astrophotography with a Canon A20 compact digital camera. I bought a Scopetronix adaptor and found it worked pretty well on planetary shots but there was no facility for longer exposures. This led me to buy a Fuji S2 Pro digital camera both for astrophotography and general use.

The Fuji S2 Pro is a superb digital SLR and with it I began to attempt more demanding astrophotography of deepsky objects. However, it soon became apparent that the MN66 was not the best scope for astrophotography. The focuser could not support the weight of the imaging equipment and it all seemed a bit unwieldy.

I decided to buy a high quality refractor to last me a long time. After some research I decided to buy a TMB refractor of 115mm or 130mm aperture at f/7 to give a reasonable compromise between speed, field of view and available magnification. In the end I decided on a four element 130mm scope that Chris at Bray Imaging had in stock - serial number 001. This is a beautiful telescope with its CNC tubing and amazing optics. The heavy tube is a challenge for the little GM8 mount since it weighs 27lb and more like 32lb when fully loaded with imaging gear and the mount is specified for a maximum payload of 30lb, but it works well enough and I have enjoyed using it whenever possible.

My most recent project was to design and have made for me, by a local metal working company, a telescope pier for the GM8 mount. A great deal of digging was required but the end result has been worth it. I now have a pier that provides a nice rigid base for the GM8, a better height for viewing with the refractor and ease of set up each night. I no longer need to lug the whole mount and tripod out and the whole rig remains pretty accurately polar aligned.

I now intend to spend most of my time catching up on the Messier and Caldwell catalogues and honing my astro-imaging skills. Hopefully you'll enjoy the results of my efforts here.