I started doing astrophotography in the autumn of 2022, about six months after my daughter was born. I'd always been interested in the sky in an abstract way — the kind of interest that doesn't survive past the first genuinely cold night outside — but that winter I couldn't sleep, had a lot of quiet hours between feeds, and started reading. By spring I had a secondhand equatorial mount and a ZWO camera that cost more than I intended to spend.
The flux in the name refers to photon flux — the measure of how many photons per second hit the sensor from a given source. It's what you're always fighting against from a light-polluted site: your signal is buried under a sky gradient that contributes far more flux than the nebula you're trying to image. Most of my technical work here is about dealing with that problem.
The nova came later. I got interested in variable stars through a post on a planetary imaging forum, and I've been doing simple differential photometry on a few Mira-type variables since mid-2024. There's something satisfying about watching a star change on a timescale you can measure with a backyard camera.
What this site is
This is primarily a technical log. I write up sessions that taught me something — whether that's a successful processing workflow, a gear failure, or just an observation about how something behaved. I don't post every session, only the ones worth documenting.
I deliberately keep the site simple. No analytics, no comment section, no newsletter. The HTML is hand-written, the CSS is one file, and there's no JavaScript. Pages load in under a second even on slow connections. I find bloated sites genuinely unpleasant to use and have no interest in making one.
The domain novaflux.icu is a nod to the two things I keep coming back to: stellar transients and the physics of how we detect faint light.
Setup
I shoot from a flat rooftop in central Europe, elevation roughly 180m, Bortle 7 on a clear night, SQM around 18.8 mag/arcsec². The neighbours on the south side have an LED security light that came on in 2023 and has been a persistent source of grief. I've learned to use it as a test: if a processing approach can handle an asymmetric gradient from a point source, it handles most other situations.
The full gear list is on the gear page.
Contact
hello [at] novaflux.icu — I read everything, reply slowly.