Welcome to the Orchard Valley Home Observatory!

My name is Frank Schwartz, and this is my observatory. It is situated in Eastern Pennsylvania, about two hours north of Philadelphia. On this web site, you will find information about the observatory, the equipment in it, some astrophotos, and hopefully some tips for getting started in observational astronomy and astrophotography.


This site

Observatory

Equipment

Astrophotography

Articles

Links to Elsewhere

About this Site




Favorite Links


Clear Sky Clock
Sky Conditions over Allentown, PA

NASA IR Satellite Weather
Infrared Weather Satellite Image over North America

NOAA Aurora Activity Map
POES Auroral Activity Map

Moon Calendar

Sky Notes
(links to the Dublin Night Sky Observer Site)

LVAAS
Lehigh Valley Amateur Astronomical Society

MAPUG
(Meade Advanced Products User Group)

PA Light Pollution
The night sky in the world

APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day



Blog

2/21/08: Time I update this thing! The kids and I went up to the hill to check out the Lunar eclipse. It was a beautiful night, despite the 20 degree temp. Check out the DSLR gallery for some photos.



1/3/07: Well, it's back to the work week, and I'm pretty much done with the site for now. I have a lot of cleaning up to do under the links pages, and I have some new photos to post, but that stuff can wait for now.



1/1/07: Happy New Year! I'm on vacation, so I spent some more time on this site. I compiled some of those articles I was talking about, and did some other major changes to the site. All in all, I'm pleased, although to be honest, I'm not too happy with all the big thick bold white text. I tried thinner text, but it's more difficult to read. All the formatting is written into a CSS file, so I can change the font sizes and colors whenever I wish. Maybe I'll play around with that some other time.

Still to do: update the astrophoto galleries. I'm still tossed between using a gallery program like Coppermine and just hand-writing the stuff. It looks nicer when I hand-write it, but it's so time consuming. Oh well...



12/29/06: I moved this site to it's own domain name, and gave it a much-needed facelift.

I still have a lot to do. Lots of changes to the astrophotography section, and I have a lot of new nifty gadgets and toys to list. Not exactly sure why I'm typing this, cuz maybe 3 people will ever read this, but whatever. Something to do, I guess.






**NOTE** This page and every page linked from it has a lot of graphics, therefore may take awhile to load.

Site contents and images © 2007 by Frank Schwartz - contact: frank-at-ovobservatory.com