During the daytime I'm a C++/Java software engineer working on large government projects. I hate sleeping, so during the night I come to life and enjoy the nighttime (kind of like a bat ;)). Living in The Netherlands means a lot of people stuffed into a small space, noise and lights. During the night eveything quiets down a bit and I love the silence. This is also where my telescope comes into the picture. For as long as I can remember I was interested in astronomy. Reading related news items, watching the APOD and so on. But I never had the means to actually take some of those beautiful images myself. Then one night I was reading the Ice in Space forums when (the now famous) Anthony Wesley had just posted a message regarding a possible impact on Jupiter. This was just 2 minutes after he posted, so I must have been one of the very first ones on the planet to know something had hit Jupiter (even NASA didn't know yet). This pushed me over the edge to take a decission to either keep reading or go out and finally buy a decent telescope. Well, since you're reading this, I've choosen the latter. Over a period of 3 months at the end of 2009 I've build up a telescope setup (of which you can see the results elsewhere on this site). So far I've only used it during a couple of brief observing sessions due to lots of bad weather. But hopefully with winter on our doorstep the sky will clear and testing can commense!