If this user has been harassing you, and you shadow-ban them, all their activities on your content will be invisible to everyone except themselves.

They will not know that they have been shadow-banned, and the goal is that eventually they will get bored while having caused no harm, since nobody saw what they posted.

This operation will reload the current page. If you have any unsaved information in a form, it will be lost.

You can also dismiss this window, and your operation will be applied at the next page navigation.

This operation cannot be undone!

When you report abuse on some content on AstroBin, the content will be hidden until a moderator reviews it. Abuse reports are anonymous and the content's owner will not be notified.

Please specify a reason for this abuse report.

I have many hobbies, but the one that has been most consistent for me is astronomy. I became interested in astronomy as a young man in my early 20s when my dad bought his first serious telescope; a Meade 8" SCT. I will never forget standing in our driveway in northeast Ohio and looking at M13 (Hercules Globular Star Cluster) for the first time. From that point on I began going out with him and learning visual astronomy. One of my favorite trips I have taken was when he and I traveled to Cherry Springs, PA to observe. I had never seen so many stars....or the Milky Way!

Years later, his interest in the hobby had waned and as a result mine did as well since I did not have equipment of my own. I would borrow his 10" dob from time-to-time and try to capture images of Saturn through the eyepiece with my cellphone (I had no idea what I was doing). Years later, I was living in New Jersey and figured owning a telescope while living next to Manhattan was likely a poor investment so I bought a pair of cannon OIS binoculars and would look up at the handful of stars and planets I could see while sitting on the balcony of my apartment. Despite not having equipment of my own or living in light polluted urban areas, I never stopped looking up because I couldn't.

In 2020, I moved home to Ohio with my wife and daughter just as the pandemic hit. Like many, I found myself confined in my home with my family. As a result, I started to research getting back into astronomy. I was torn between buying an obsession telescope or trying to figure out astrophotography. Two very different paths from an astronomer's perspective. Up to that point, I always thought it was silly to go out at night and spend hours sitting in the dark fiddling with settings on a computer rather than looking through an eyepiece. I was wrong! There was so much more to see when using a camera from my bortles 7.5 backyard.

I decided to buy my first AP equipment (and in fact my first telescope ever; cem 40, radian 61, zwo 294mc pro). It took me ~15 hours of watching videos and working in the field to figure out and memorize how to set up my equipment and take my first image. My dad was with me on that night as he was curious to see what I was doing. When the first image came back, he said he had never seen me so excited, at least not since I was a kid. We got 3 amazing images that night; the North American Nebula, the California Nebula, and the Andromeda Galaxy. From that moment I have been hooked and coincidentally it reignited his interest in astronomy causing him to buy an evscope. Unfortunately, Ohio is a cloudy place so it has been challenging to progress. Each cloudless night is precious to me and I try to make the most of it. I am currently playing the long game with my wife in getting her to agree to move to the desert. Hopefully, it will pay off in about 10 years :)

Job

Corporate Strategy

Hobbies

Astrophotography, scale modeling, hiking, climbing, traveling, reading, movies, philosophy, guitar, gaming