My interest in astronomy began at a very young age, but I didn't get very serious until I started college four years ago. A friend had a junky K-mart style refractor and we saw Saturn, Jupiter and even a few of the brighter Messier objects. Once I started making enough money to purchase a telescope, I bought a 12.5" Meade Starfinder in October of 2002. Since then I have observed all planets but Pluto, all Messier objects, all objects on the Herschel 400 list and many Herschel 2 objects. I started in astrophotography several months after buying the telescope. Since my telescope didn't come with a mount, I was only able to take very short exposures. Moreover, I only had a digital camera that only did short exposures. I started with lunar and planetary photos obtained by sticking the camera up to the eyepiece. I then purchased a Logitech Quickcam Zoom and learned about a process called "Off-Chip Video Integration." Here you stack thousands of individual short exposures hoping to get images of dimmer objects. This turned out to be nearly impossible for most deep sky objects. Most of the photos I took with this camera were planetary. Then I learned that some webcams can be modified for long exposure. The first one I obtained was a Connectix Greyscale. You simply snip a wire on the inside and you can now take long exposures. The problem then becomes that Dobsonians can only do a few second-long exposures without a mount. My next purchase was a Johnsonian mount that the Dobsonian sits on. With perfect polar alignment, this allowed approximately 45 second exposure times. The Connectix was prone to breaking, so I decided to buy a Quickcam Pro 4000. The procedure for modifying this webcam for long-exposure is tricky and requires some serious soldering work. I paid someone else to do it and started getting results immediately. The photos were now color! Unfortunately, like the Connectix, the wires had a high propensity for snapping. Finally I broke down and bought a SAC-7, which is based on the same technology as the Quickcam, but it has already been modified and is put in a more secure box than the usual Quickcam housing. The problem then was that I had been using eyepiece projection with the Quickcam, but that was nearly impossible with this new camera. A friend owned a Celestron C8 (one of the first publicly available equatorial scopes). I purchased it dirt cheap and started taking pictures at prime focus (with a focal reducer). Finally in January 2005, I purchased a Sac 8.5. It is an extremely sensitive CCD style webcam. I hope to eventually buy a full blown CCD camera and a GoTo telescope.