Dark Highland

I’m Beau, an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer based in southern New Hampshire. Most of the images here start in my backyard, working around trees, the weather, and whatever happens to be in the right patch of sky that night.

I enjoy the technical side of this hobby: getting equipment working together, figuring out what went wrong, and learning how to bring out the detail in an image. But I’m just as happy looking through an eyepiece. Trips to darker skies out west have given me some incredible views, and plenty of reasons to keep getting outside with a telescope.

Dark Highland is a place to share the photographs and the experience behind them. That includes the equipment and exposure details, things I’ve learned, and the occasional problem that took far longer to solve than it should have. Some of the older images have obvious flaws, but I’m still proud of them. They’re part of how I got here.

I’m also building a small backyard observatory, with the aim of spending less time setting up and more time actually using the equipment. You’ll find that project here alongside the images, practical notes, and other astronomy-related experiments.

I’m still learning, and I expect that to remain a fairly permanent feature of the hobby. Hopefully something here is useful, interesting, or simply enjoyable to look at.