Tomorrow morning, I’ll be heading west to the Advanced Imaging Conference in Santa Clara, California, which starts bright and early on Friday morning and lasts for more than two days. This amazing gathering is one of the biggest for amateur skyshooters around the world and will consist of many talks and workshops, as well as lots of advertisers on scene with their hot new products. Discussions will encompass the whole of astroimaging, from the simplest point-and-shoot capturing of constellations to the most sophisticated photography of moons, stars, planets, and galaxies.

The event takes place at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. Astronomy magazine is proud to be a sponsor of the AIC, and I’ll be speaking on Saturday about the past 35 years of amateur astronomy, my experiences with Astronomy and Deep Sky magazines, and where astronomical imaging is headed. Many thanks to Ken Crawford, Jay GaBany, Bob Fera, and the whole crew that does such a magnificent job putting on the AIC for inviting me.

I stopped taking my own pictures of the sky when I was 15 because some of the world’s best started sending me shots for Deep Sky Monthly, and I simply wasn’t in their class. The rest of the speaker group reads like a who’s who of imagers and astronomers: Adam Block, Ken Crawford, Bob Fera, Don Goldman, Tony Hallas, Bernhard Hubl, Geoff Marcy, Tim Puckett, and many others. It will be exciting to hear such a distinguished crowd talk about cutting-edge astroimaging.

I’ll be blogging on the road during this terrific event — stay tuned!