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About Us:
Hello World!
Let me introduce myself. My name is John D. Stanley and this is my Astrophotography website. All the Advanced CCD Images displayed here are my handiwork.
I'm a retired Software Engineer with over 35 years of System Programming Experience doing everything from Device Drivers to World Wide Telecommunications Systems to Commercial PC and Console Game Development (and everything in between). I was raised in (West) Los Angeles, California where I attended Venice High School. I've always been extremely technically adept and so I started programming computers in 1966 at age 10 during weekend visits to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. The Father of a school friend who worked at Rand as a Research Scientist give me several of Rand's computer programming manuals to study and said, "Figure it out yourself" - so I read the manuals cover-to-cover and that how I learned to program my first PDP-6 "JOSS" computer.
Throughout my life, when it comes to gaining technical skills & knowledge, I've always acquired them the same way. Read the darn manuals cover-to-cover and figure it out for myself. On this website you will find the fruits of my labors. I don't claim to be an expert at taking Advanced CCD Images but I do enjoy taking them and I continue to learn more about the subject each time I setup my equiment under a Dark Sky...
John D. Stanley
February 2010
P.S. For all of you that have never programmed in C/C++, "Hello World!" is the first program you learn to write.
The Journey Begins...
Welcome to my window to the Galaxy! All my life I have felt the pull of the Stars. Starting when I was a young child and first saw a black & white picture of a distant Galaxy. It was in Junior College that I had my first formal introduction to Astronomy - first Solar followed by Stellar. But studying the Stars through old College text books left me with an unfulfilled feeling.
It wasn't until 2007 following the death of my wife that I decided to buy my first telescope so that I could freely explore the Stars. But even though my Meade LX200 telescope was a true window to the Stars it could not show me what I actually wanted to see.
Finally after seeing the PBS Nova episode "Seeing in the Dark" I decided to go ahead and equip my telescope with a CCD camera. Unfortunately my LX200 was designed as a visual telescope which made it a very poor platform for taking advanced CCD images. So in June 2008 I "jumped off the fence" and ordered a real Astrograph telescope capable of capturing many of the hidden wonders of the Universe I want to see.
I created this website to display the wonders that I capture through my telescope…
"It's one thing to look into a book of beautiful Star images and quite another to capture those images yourself…"
John D. Stanley
November 2008
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