I've been sitting on this one for a while, and I'm finally excited to put it out there: welcome to Central Texas Astro Photo.
If you've followed along here for any length of time, you know I love this hobby — the setup, the long nights under Texan skies in my observatory, the processing rabbit holes, all of it. Central Texas Astro Photo grew out of that same love, but with a more focused mission: to make astrophotography and astronomy more accessible to folks right here in Central Texas, whether you're just curious about what's overhead tonight or you're ready to point a camera at it yourself.
The mission is pretty simple. Get more people looking up and help them do it well. That means teaching the basics — how to find your way around the night sky, how a telescope actually works, how to take that first long-exposure shot without wanting to throw the camera in the yard — and it also means sharing my own images and experience along the way, mistakes included.
But there's a bigger piece to this too, and it's honestly the part I'm most excited about. A core part of the mission is raising funds to donate telescopes to local schools. Not every kid gets a chance to look through a real telescope, let alone have one sitting in their classroom to use whenever the sky cooperates, and I think that's the kind of thing that can hook someone on science for life. So, beyond the teaching and the outreach events, Central Texas Astro Photo is also working to raise money specifically earmarked for putting telescopes into the hands of local schools and students who wouldn't otherwise have access to one. Here's the concrete part: 50% of all funds raised from the astrophotography classes goes directly toward donating smart scopes to local schools. So if you sign up for a class, you're not just learning how to shoot the night sky yourself, you're helping put that same capability in a classroom.
Where it serves is the whole Central Texas region — Liberty Hill, Austin, and the surrounding Hill Country communities where we're lucky enough to still have reasonably dark skies within a short drive. Whether that's a star party, a hands-on session with one of my Dwarf3 smart scopes, or a visit to a local observatory, the idea is to bring the experience to people rather than assume they'll find their own way into it.I was actually inspired by helping a local schoolboy out with an astronomy project for a science fair. He did so well and scored an award ascertaining that his project was several years above his grade level! He was thrilled, and so was I. So-much-so that I gave him a pair of astronomical binoculars to keep his interests alive. Thus, I got the inspiration to develop this program.
This didn't come together overnight. Honestly, it's been several months in the making — figuring out the right format, testing what actually works when you're teaching someone astrophotography for the first time, and making sure I had something worth putting my name on before I launched it. There were a few false starts along the way, but that's pretty normal for anything worth doing right.
If you want more information, you can click here: centraltexasastrophoto.com.
