Meet AstroBackyard

By AstroBackyard

Published on November 22, 2021 under

We take pictures of space

Hello, fellow campers! We are Trevor and Ashley — nature lovers, photographers, and new TAB 400 owners from Ontario Canada. We own and operate AstroBackyard, a side hustle turned full-time business in the field of astrophotography.

Trevor started AstroBackyard in 2015 as a way to share his astrophotography journey with others. Over the years, it has developed into a trusted online resource for all levels of astrophotographers but focuses on helping beginners.

We left our office/corporate jobs (Trevor in 2018 and Ashley in 2020) to grow our business and share our love of astronomy and astrophotography by creating resources that help educate others, and maybe even pique their interest in joining the Astro community.

Trevor, through his journey, is now an experienced amateur astrophotographer with over 10 years of experience. His photos have been published in astrophotography books, SkyNews magazine, and featured as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD).

The success of AstroBackyard has led to greater involvement in the Astro community, through speaking engagements, judging photography contests, and advocating for the protection and conservation of dark skies.

What is Astrophotography?

Astrophotography unites amateur astronomy and the art of photography using different pieces of equipment. It can involve anything from a DSLR camera and lens combination to a dedicated astronomy camera, telescope, and equatorial mount. The end results are awe-inspiring images of wide-field nightscapes or mind-blowing deep-space objects like nebulae and galaxies.

Like many types of photography, the basic elements of this hobby include the understanding of long exposure images, focus, and image processing with some unique and added challenges.

A typical night of astrophotography involves setting up your gear, capturing several long exposures of your target, and then processing your image by stacking many exposures together and editing your photo to bring out the colours. This, of course, is the simplified version and does not include any troubleshooting issues – which are worth it to see a photo of a nebula or galaxy that is thousands (or millions) of lightyears away.

*Trevor Jones is set up used to photography the North America Nebula*.

Where does our TAB 400 fit in?

So what does all this have to do with nuCamp? As we mentioned earlier, we are brand new TAB 400 owners. After what felt like endless amounts of research, we placed our order for our TAB in January 2020 and received our unit (also known as Voyager 1), in early August.

As outdoor enthusiasts, we have done our fair share of tent camping over the years, but we have always dreamt about having a travel trailer. Aside from the coziness of a small yet functional space, a trailer offers us the ability to travel long distances in search of darker skies.

Although we received our TAB in late summer, we managed to venture to a few Provincial Parks here in Ontario before the end of the season. On our second trip, we captured a photo of the North America Nebula from our campsite. We shared this adventure on our YouTube channel and plan to bring our audience along for many more adventures as we travel to new places.

If you’ve bought a travel trailer, like a TAB 400 or TAB 320/CS-S, etc., chances are you love adventure and being out in nature. Travel trailers have the ability to bring us to some pretty extraordinary places, most of which are dark with a star-filled sky. We encourage you to shut off your lights and look up – soak in all the wonder and beauty that inspired everything from science, philosophy, art, religion, and literature for thousands of years.