About me.

Hi, I’m Erwin Kats I was born in a coastal city in the Netherlands called IJmuiden in the year 1988. At the moment I’m active as a freelancer in ICT with main focus towards large scale fiber optic and wireless networks throughout the European Union, next to this I’m also active as a car detailer but only a limited number of cars will be done each year as it’s mainly exclusive cars and in the weekends.

My interest in astronomy started when I was 11 years old, with a big part of my family we went to visit a observatory called ‘’sterrenwacht Limburg’’ during our holidays. The moment they showed Jupiter and Saturn through a telescope I was instantly interested. Not much later my parents gave me my first telescope which was a refractor telescope the Meade ETX 70AT.

As I wasn’t really a big fan of visual observing ( except for planets ) I started to look in astrophotography, this started with the ETX70 and a Philips webcam but I just wasn’t skilled enough to get the result I wanted ( oh, the technology was also in the early stages both hardware and software were challenging )

After some years I was able to buy a Meade LX90 8’’ which was a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector telescope, of course I used the telescope for observing our moon and planets. At this time the dedicated planetary and deep sky camera’s started to become available for the majority of the people. In the beginning I started some planetary imaging with a Meade LPI camera and piggy back imaging with a Canon EOS 350D.

As a secondary telescope I installed a William Optics Zenithstar 80ED on top of the LX90, but the limitations of the alt/az mount of the Meade fork mount were exceeded very quickly so any results were not great.

The next logical step was to buy a mount that I could use for astrophotography, had better functions and specifications. In this case I went for the Losmandy G-11 mount, for that time a great mount. On the G-11 I used several telescopes ( OTA’s ), the LX90 8’’ first, followed by a Stellarvue SV102ED which was then followed up by a Vixen R200SS Newtonian telescope. For widefield imagining I used Canon L lenses like the 24-105F4 L, with the upcoming popularity of CCD camera’s I also upgraded the Canon DSLR to a QSI 583WS monochrome camera with 5 position filter wheel.

Due to new technical innovations and dedication to keep going with the hobby my next decision was to order a Astro Systeme Austria Direct Drive Mount 85 ( ASA DDM85 ), in the beginning I used the Vixen R200SS as a OTA but I replaced this with a Takahashi FSQ106 shortly after.