About

Me at my scope (photo by Adam Correia)

About Me

I grew up in Fermont, a small mining town in the sub-arctic tundra of northern Quebec on the Labrador border. Dark skies and frequent aurorae were my a regular part of my childhood.

While I never got into astronomy in any serious way at the time due to inaccessibility of reading material on the subject, I did learn to navigate the sky, the constellations, some of the bright stars, planets, etc. While always having the sky and stars as an interest, I only got actively involved in astronomy in 2000 after looking through a friend’s telescope for the first time. Needing some guidance, I purchased copies of NightWatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe and The Universe and Beyond by Terence Dickinson, and those two books served as a launch pad that put me on my current journey. The purchase of my first (of many) telescopes followed shortly thereafter, and I’ve been a sky watcher ever since.

Largely self-taught in astrophotography, I’ve been practicing this craft relentlessly whenever possible since 2012. On most dark, clear nights from spring to fall, I can be found at one of a few dark sites with my mobile observatory doing deep sky imaging, or taking landscape photographs with the starry night sky as a backdrop.

I started the Dark Arts Astrophotography blog to chronicle my experience as an astrophotographer and provide tutorials and reviews geared at novices. Several of my articles, reviews and photos have been published in Amateur Astrophotography Magazine. My s photos have also been published in the said magazine, as well as the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s journal and the book 100 Nature Hot Spots in Ontario.

In 2015, I submitted the winning entry in the Lennox and Addington County Shoot The Stars Night Sky Photography Contest. Then in 2016, I won Kingstonist’s Kingston’s Greatest Photo Contest from a pool of thousands of entries

For more details, you can read my first blog entry here: Introduction, or who the hell is this clown anyway?

About the DAA Blog

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. ” – Albert Einstein

I originally started the DAA blog back in November 2013 as a sort of “public diary” to gauge my progress in astrophotography. At the time, I had been into astrophotography for just over a year and I was just starting to figure out what I was doing. I thought it would be cool to share my success, failures and lessons learned with other novice astrophotographers. I’m not sure if I really hit the mark, as the blog has been a bit eclectic in its range of topics, but it did prove to be quite successful and somewhat popular.

People seem to genuinely find what I have to say informative and written in terms simple enough that anyone can understand. I value the ability to be able to speak about what can be complex topics in layman’s terms, as it means what I have to say is more accessible to beginners or people that just have no knowledge of the topic. So if I can entertain and educate someone along the way, then I consider that a success. Several of my articles proved quite successful and were quite popular, garnering thousands of views. As of the time of writing, several of my blog entries have been published as articles in Amateur Astrophotography Magazine.

I’m not sure where I’ll be going with the blog in the future, but I do hope to offer more instructional / tutorial type entries. Time will tell.