About Me

Astronomiser is run by me, Andy Ellis. I've been an amateur astronomer for a few years and have found that a lot of parts, services and cables are either not available in the UK or not available at all.

A few years ago, I started making a few cables for friends. I also made a few adapters for power control and parallel guiding of my mount (now the GPI). When I bought a Canon 300D I decided to make a serial control cable so that I could automatically do a series of timed shots using DSLR Focus and a hand-held remote control. Eventually I decided to modify my 300D for astro use to give me a portable setup for when I visit my local dark-sky site without having to drag along a large leisure battery to power my laptop. The modification of all sorts of dSLR cameras is now a service Astronomiser offers and we have successfully carried out hundreds of conversions.

Andy Stentiford, a good friend and fellow amateur astronomer also developed products for controlling and powering multiple dew bands and had himself developed a handheld shutter release for the 300D.

It quickly became obvious that quite a few people needed similar products so with Andy's help we developed the astronomiser range.

I now have Andy to thank for some of the product designs and the original product branding (and a large part of the original web design) and I am very grateful to him for helping get us off the ground. Unfortunately Andy has a very full life and busy career and was unable to take more of a role, but many thanks to him for all his hard work and the very best of wishes with his own endeavours.

The equipment I own is constantly changing - some of it can be seen on my AstroImaging site - coxellis.net though I now run my setup from an observatory. Also on my site there is a selection of the images I have taken with a variety of cameras and equipment.

As a hobby, I also used to build long exposure modified webcams for friends - I'm constantly striving for new methods of noise reduction and ways to make the whole process less complicated.

When ATiK Instruments stopped producing the ATK-1C, ATK-1HS, ATK-2C and ATK-2HS, Steve Chambers asked me if I would like to pick up the commercial production of cameras based on the same techniques and I introduced the Astronomiser CCD Camera range, the ASTSC15C being directly comparable to the ATK-1C, the ASTSC15BW to the ATK-1HS, the ASTSC3 to the ATK-2HS.

I'm also a keen member of the Amateur Astronomy community. I regularly attend Star Parties, I'm an administrator of UKAstroImaging and am an active member of my local astronomical society Sunderland AS.

I can be contacted at the following address (or use the contact page):