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Anyone have a description or pictures of some of the setups these "professional amateurs" have? I'm sure some of them run well over $100,000.

I am in the process of building a small observatory to house my 10" Schmidt Cassegrain Catadioptric telescope. It's currently on an equaltorial mount, but it will be on a permanent pier once the observatory is built..

It uses a series of lenses an mirrors and is computer operated. It has a database of over 65,000 objects and is operated with a numbered key pad, where one can punch in the coordinates of a specific object and the telescope will go directly to it. It will also be able to be operated remotely with software that will control the telescope from my desktop PC inside my house.

I currently obtain images using a film format with a 35mm camera, but hope to obtain a used CCD digital camera someday in the near future. They are expensive but they are much more sensitive to low light objects than film, and there is no film processing involved, you get the image on the computer screen almost instantly. Once the image comes up on the computer screen it can then be moved into photoshop for enhancement and further digital processing. I have some photographs of the Planet Saturn, and Jupiter, and several of the Orion Nebula, and many shots of the lunar surface, all on film format. If I can figure out how to post them I will. That's something I just haven't done yet, but need to figure it out.

Anyone have a description or pictures of some of the setups these "professional amateurs" have? I'm sure some of them run well over $100,000.

I was fortunate enough to live during my high school years in the small Ohio town where Leslie Peltier lived. Peltier was at the time arguably the most famous amateur astronomer in the world. He had written one of the classic books on amateur astronomy, "Starlight Nights", and in his lifetime he discovered 12 comets, six novae, and made over 130,000 variable star observations.

As a young man he hand-built the unique Merry-Go-Round Observatory which he used countless times to make many of his discoveries:

By the time I came to know him (late 70's), he had built a much larger, more traditional domed observatory to house a larger telescope (the above photo appears to have been taken from within the domed observatory).

It was through Peltier's telescope that I first saw the spectacle of the shadows of the mountains on the Moon along the terminator of the half-moon. I fondly remember eating fresh apples from one of the trees in his yard as a friend and I gazed up into the skies.

I'm not sure how much his setup cost in total. Surely the original "merry-go-round" observatory from which he made many of his discoveries was built at minimal cost, so it doesn't take a fortune to become a successful amateur astronomer. His larger observatory, of course, cost a reasonably substantial amount.