About myself

Back when I was a kid my first 'hobby' was collecting rocks. My mother and father used to take us to Croatia, Italy, Switzerland, Spain,...by car over holidays. On occasional stops along the road I always collected some pebbles.
By the age of 12 I discovered the sky above. I got a pair of 20x50 binoculars that used to belong to my dad and without any particular reason pointed them towards the sky.
One of the first thing I saw were the Pleiades, and later I learned they were part of 'my constellation' - Taurus, the Bull. Well I might just have been somewhat of a bull at that age, like 'sitting-bull'. I was a lazy boy that got very obsessively interested by different things but I never really went for something. Except my interest in astronomy, that got bigger. I used to draw Jupiter and its moons for a good period of time between 1991-'92. Hunting faint-galaxies and clusters became my obsession until I was 16, after I traded my good old 2.4" refractor for an 8" Schmidt-Newton. A turbulent 'get out on your own' period followed in which I finally bought my first computer and a good camera.
In 1997 Pathfinder had made it to the Martian soil and really got me hooked on Mars. I got interested in digital photography a few years later and switched to digital, except for black&white photography.

Some years went by and all at once I have a family and spend my days waiting for the arrival of Spirit, the first of two robotic rovers send to Mars to investigate the floor of Gusev Crater, Aeolis.
I remember watching the live webcast of the landings as if it were yesterday. I suddenly felt deep respect for all who made it happen, including Mars.

It wasn't until the beginning of 2004 that I wanted to learn more about the mission. I was googling to seek other Mer-addicts and found the Unmanned Spaceflight forum-or UMSF. I immediately felt quite at home and was excited to share this passion.
I learned a lot over there and everyone still does, there is a fine atmosphere of fellow Mer-enthusiasts and imagery freaks learning from one another and making panoramas, anaglyphs, polar projections, vertical exaggerations, you name it.

March 2005; At the very end of the month, awalkonmars came online. Using PTgui panorama-software and some plugins making mosaics gets easier. And there's an interest. Statistics at the end of April, ~8 Gbyte
download. I'm happy. I realized though the format of my site wasn't any good and it was designed to hold hundreds of pages and thousands of images. In other words, I'd be dead before filling it all up. So I went back to randomly choosing certain sols on which Spirit and Opportunity shot mosaics and experimented more and more with Ptgui. But suddenly you're stuck with 5 hd's on steroids and a continuous ram-problem.

December 2005; well over 10000 visits total and just over 24 Gbytes of download for November... I finally got the 'new' site ready and made a selection of mosaics to work on, via a list for both rovers. I love working on panoramas more and more and started to make some prints. I also began shooting my own mosaics but Spirit and Opportunity still get most of the attention. What do you want? They're cuties, not?!

On the work itself