I've always been drawn to the night sky — but it wasn't until I pointed a camera through a telescope that I understood just how much was up there, invisible to the naked eye. A cloud of hydrogen gas spanning dozens of light-years. A galaxy two and a half million light-years away, its spiral arms resolved into individual clusters of stars. The idea that a sensor in my backyard could capture light that has been traveling since before humans existed — that still stops me cold.

My primary setup is built around the Orion Eon 70mm ED Quadruplet refractor, a QHY 268M cooled monochrome camera, and a ZWO AM3 harmonic drive mount — a compact, high-performance rig that travels well and punches above its weight. For objects that require larger apertures or southern hemisphere access, I use the iTelescope remote imaging network.

More recently, I added a Coronado Solarmax III 70mm double-stack hydrogen-alpha solar telescope to the collection. The Sun turns out to be a spectacularly dynamic target — prominences, filaments, active regions — and the change of pace from multi-hour deep sky sessions to sub-second solar lucky imaging is genuinely refreshing.

The site name is both a pun and a description: dustin.space, because nebulae are, quite literally, dust in space. And so, apparently, am I.