| Model | human |
| Subclass | male |
| Identifier | Oliver Pettenpaul |
| Date of production | 1971 |
| Education | university degree in computer science |
| Profession | software engineer in electronic production services and printed circuit board design |
| Obsessions | astronomy, astro-imaging music (active&passive), GalaxySo, guitars photography mountainbiking aquascaping |
| Location | milky way, solar system, earth, 51:53:13n, 08:45:23e |
I hope you can enjoy your visit on my site, maybe you can find something
usefull and share the same passion than I do to understand spending
nights out in the cold and processing gigabytes of data afterwards Best wishes, |
My interest in astronomy and especially the solar system developed as
a kid as soon as I could read all according books within reach. I enjoyed
drawing star maps during clear nights or observing the moon with the
famous "Yps telescope" (plastic lenses and cardboard tube
out of a comic magazine). Somehow my interest fell asleep for many years
until I spent a night under a wide skylight window recalling all my
childhood memories. I was deeply impressed by the upcoming webcam imaging
techniques and the stunning results obtained with very affordable equipment
in the early 2000s and had to try this for myself. As soon as I had
captured my first webcam mosaic of the moon I was totally hooked on
astro-imaging. I enjoy observing deepsky objects visually but in terms
of imaging my main interest is the solar system. Galaxies, nebulae and
star clusters remain almost unchanged - at least for our lifetime beeing
much less than a blink of an eye in the universal context. In contrast
the views of our solar system are alive: The sun's photosphere changes
constantly, filaments in the atmosphere rise and collaps within minutes,
mars shows distinct seasons at the polar regions, the surface features
the biggest volcanoes in the solar system with clouds hovering over
their slopes, Saturn shows us constantly changing angles of the impressive
ring system, white spot storms interrupt the delicate cloud bands, Jupiter's
surface is constantly changing, giant cloud and storm features including
the famous red spot always model a unique view that never will be the
same again while the jovian moons are dancing around the biggest planet
in our home system, Venus hides under a thick cloud layer, only ultraviolet
imaging can reveal details in the otherwise uniform cloud carpet and
finally the earth's moon never looks the same due to the changing angle
of sunlight and libration although our satelite is virtually unchanged
for a very long time teaching us so much about the early days in the
solar system and the history of our home planet. And always remember:
All the things we see in the solar system are made out of the same stardust
than we are.