I have been busy expanding my Youtube page at https://www.youtube.com/c/AllanHall creating a ton of new content in my renovated video studio. Current work includes quick start guides, product reviews, and general information/tutorials. You should come by the channel and take a look!
Some of my new videos include:
With a huge list of titles currently in the works you are sure to find interesting ones for you. Check them out and let me know what you think. If you have any suggestions, or a topic you would like to see covered, leave me a comment and let me know. I will do my best to answer any question, and produce requested videos when I can.
Be sure to subscribe to the channel and click the notification bell to be one of the first to watch new content as I release it!
Do you have a story, how-to, review, or just something fun to share about astronomy/astrophotography with our thousands of visitors every month? Want to tell everyone about the furry little critter that visited you at the dark site, what you think of the new version of Pixinsight, how you captured that tiny slice of a young moon, or how much fun you had the other night doing the Messier binocular challenge? Now you can!
Simply visit https://allans-stuff.com/user-submissions/ and fill out the form. I will read it, and assuming it is the awesome article I know it will be, I’ll approve it and it will be immediately displayed on the blog complete with pictures if you want to upload them. Images can be up to 1500 x 1500 in size and you may include up to 5.
I also welcome clubs to post about upcoming events, lectures, and more!
This feature is for people to share their experiences and love of astronomy and astrophotography related subjects, not for people to make money off my website. Any links to products, services, or competitors are subject to deletion or modification at my sole discretion. Purely commercial spam will be deleted. All posts are held for approval.
Vendors who would like to post about new products or services will need to visit https://allans-stuff.com/contact-me/ and get permission before posting.
Since this is our first contest, hopefully of many to come, we decided to keep things simple. Sign up for our mailing list and get entered for a free Kindle version of any of the books by Allan Hall currently available. It’s that easy!
It is probably overdue but Allans Stuff is finally joining social media. To start off, we will work on getting our blog posts linked/posted to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+, in that order. This may take a while to get fully implemented so if you are primarily a Google+ user it may be a little while before you start seeing content. Of course we will be engaging with our fans on these platforms as well but that too may be a little slow to start with so please bear with us.
We already have a presence on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/AllanHall with about 550 subscribers and over 100,000 video views, so be sure and drop by and subscribe to the channel. There are a lot of good videos already with more on the way.
When I first started writing books I thought setting up a forum for support of the books would be a good idea. Unfortunately I never really kept up with it and soon it fell by the wayside. It soon broke to the point that new users could not even register. Sad.
Recently I have had some people ask me what happened to the forums and so I decided to put in some work and get them back up and running. After many upgrades, head pounding, and new additions, the new and improved astrophotography forum is ready for action.
While originally intended to support my books, since my books are primarily aimed at astrophotography, that theme will permeate the forums making them mostly an astrophotography forum. This should be pretty obvious with the big moon phase at the top right of the screen!
Of course there is a set of astronomy forums in there too. Even though most of my work has been with a DSLR, and most of my books cover that form of imaging, this is not just a DSLR astrophotography forum.
Since allans-stuff.com is one of the leading astrophotography websites today, it just made sense to have its own astrophotography forum where you can not only discuss the techniques presented in my books, but general imaging topics too.
So if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas or corrections about any of my books, or want to talk about astrophotography, astronomy, or any other subjects really, head on over to the forums. If you have any problems getting signed up, use the contact form here on allans-stuff.com to send me a message and I will get it straightened out for you.
Hop on over to the AS Forum and post up some astrophotography pics!
A while back, a customer who goes by Brucer on Amazon, suggested I add more data to the web page for Long Exposure Astrophotography so people who bought the book would have more astrophotography data to practice with. I thought that was an excellent idea but was crazy busy at the times.
I have found some time to add a little to the website so I am please to announce I have uploaded additional astrophotography data including lights, darks and bias files that I used to process my images of M16 the Eagle Nebula, M22 cluster, IC281 the Pac Man nebula, and NGC6992 the Eastern Veil Nebula.
These are the exact same raw files I used so you can see the end results I came up with on my website. That gives you something to shoot for!
Although I can not always fulfill every request, I really love it when people give me suggestions to help other readers learn astrophotography and I do what I can. If you have any ideas, suggestions or requests, please do not hesitate to use the contact form or drop by the forums and let me know.
For a couple of years now you have been able to purchase the book Getting Started: Using an Equatorial Telescope Mount from Amazon as a Kindle book. After numerous requests I have finally restructured the book and released it as a print version for those who want an actual book to take with them outside and learn their new mount.
Both versions of the book are available on Amazon.com via this link.