Who is Brian Rachford, how did these pages start?
First of all, I received my Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1998 and I’m currently a professional astronomer, working as a college professor at the moment. My interest in astronomy began when I was about 10, but it wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I realized that I could actually do astronomy as a career! However, I did a lot of amateur astronomy growing up. I had a 60mm refractor, and I observed with that and a pair of 7×50 binoculars fairly often from the dark skies of the small Iowa town in which I grew up. I took my first astrophoto on 13 Feb 1988, a 1 minute shot of Venus and Jupiter in the same 50mm frame. This was during my first year of college at the University of Iowa. That was my first camera, a late Christmas present that I still use today. By March of that year, I talked my grandpa and uncle into constructing a simple barndoor tracking platform from plans in Astronomy magazine. With this, I astrophotographed with 50mm and 135mm lenses whenever I was home from school d
