I am a retired electronic design engineer living in Phoenix, Arizona with my wife Janine and two grown children, Matt and Ben. I received my BSEE from the University of Missouri. In my senior year I was awarded a Marshall Scholarship by the British government and spent the next two years in England where I got my Master’s degree in computer science. I married my wife Janine two days before we left for England and we spent the first two years of our marriage living in England and traveling around Europe. After our return we could not quite sync up our careers and spent the next two years living in separate cities and seeing each other on weekends. I worked at GE Aerospace in New Jersey and Janine was a radio announcer and Program Director at radio stations in Harrisburg, PA and then Salisbury MD. We eventually managed to live in the same city and in 1990 we started our family with the birth of our first son Matt, followed three years later by the birth of our youngest son Ben.

Soon after Ben was born we move to Phoenix and have lived here ever since. I worked at Zycad Corporation doing electronic design consulting for Intel and other companies in Phoenix until 1994 when I took a job with Synopsys, Inc where I spent the next 25 years as an application engineer and design consultant. I retired in March of 2020. My wife took a job as a radio announcer at KBAQ in Phoenix and you can still here on the air from seven to midnight weekdays at 89.5 FM in Phoenix or you can stream her at kbaq.org. My son Matt is a Captioning Agent at CaptionCall which provides captioning services for the hearing impaired. My son Ben is a biochemist at the Biodesign Institute at ASU in Phoenix.

It was my son Ben that got me interested in astronomy in 2007. He had an astronomy project in junior high that required him to check out a telescope and locate and view about a dozen objects. We found the East Valley Astronomy Club (EVAC) and attended one of their star parties. Ben was able to view all of his objects and got an A on the project. Shortly after that I purchased a Celestron CPC 1100 and Ben and I attended various star parties and Messier Marathon’s around the Phoenix area. Someone told me about Hyperstar that would allow me to attach a DSLR to my CPC 1100 and take pictures. I took my first picture in the parking lot of Starizona in Tucson and was hooked on astrophotography.

I moved on from the CPC 1100 to an Explore Scientific 102mm refractor with a DSLR and then to a TEC-140 refractor with an SBIG ST8300 on an Astro Physics 900 GTO mount. I would drive outside Phoenix to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, setup my system, image until two or three in the morning, break it all down and drive home. This got really old quick and in October of 2010 I setup my system at a permanent remote observatory near Animas, NM called Rancho Hidalgo. I have been imaging there ever since although it is now called Dark Sky New Mexico.

I spent seven years imaging with my TEC-140. My processing skills improved and I started getting my images published in Astronomy Magazine, Sky and Telescope and several other publications. On April 16, 2013, I got my first APOD.

Finally, in 2017 I saw first light with my current system; a Planewave CDK17 on a Paramount ME mount with an FLI PL16803 camera and Astrodon LRGB and 3nm narrowband filters. You can see my image library at my website, http://www.azstarman.net. In addition to imaging, I also have a data subscription service for those that would like to join a team and get access to the data produced by my system. I also sell complete data sets to the objects I have imaged if you would like to try your processing skills on some deep data from the CDK17.

I plan to continue imaging as long as my health will allow. I am sure I will run out of time before the sky runs out of objects to image. I have been doing this for 13 years now and continue to be amazed at the beauty and vastness of the universe. I hope people get as much joy out of my images as I get out of capturing and processing them.