The purpose of this site is to share my exploration of the art and science of amateur astronomy and astrophotography with other enthusiasts. Ultra-portable small equipment and urban observing are the main focus. The images, goals, experiences, and opinions are my own. I hope that you will find some knowledge and inspiration in my journey for your own and share your experiences too.

The "not so bad" in the name came from my original intent: become less bad by avoiding repeating mistakes. It’s also an homage to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog and the other wonderful science education work he does.

The site is fast and clean, the best way I know of to show respect for my readers' time and attention along with good content. It’s difficult to make an image intensive site fast. Managed pages on the site are pre-built to make it as responsive as possible. I use model driven, correct by construction, techniques to provide alternative ways to quickly navigate and discover content. This means that it is easy to change the appearance of the site and reorganize it as it grows. A great property of this site design is that links to existing content will not break when the site is reorganized - so bookmark without fear!

The couple thousand lines of XML code that drive the site are derived from the class project in Bob Boiko’s excellent Website Architecture and Design with XML course available from O’Reilly. My content model and XML database are maintained using the excellent Oxygen XML Editor.

I expect this site to scale to thousands of images while keeping it fast, flexible, and simple. I’ll be improving content, functionality, and appearance as I learn more and my tastes improve. I hope you enjoy visiting it as much as I have creating it.