about me
My name is Arno Rottal and I was born in 1985 near Vienna.
When I was 14 I got in touch with astronomy for the first time.
I found a binocular in the cellar and observed the moon.
I was very impressed and I wanted to know more so I visited the Planetarium Vienna where I met Prof. Herman Mucke, a famous Austrian astronomer .
He aroused my interest even more and so I started to work as his assistant after serveral exams in the Viennese Planetarium and I got my first telescope, a Meade ETX90EC, from my parents.
After Prof. Mucke`s retirement we concentrated our work on the "Open-Air-Planetarium and the Stargarden Vienna" where we had serveral events per month to show the night-sky to people who could just observe by naked eye .
2007 I was lucky to get a Celestron C9'25 on a Losmandy G11 Mount for free from an estate.
The idea of imaging the astronomical targets which I observed got bigger and bigger. I made some images of the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn with a homebrew webcam.
In January 2013 I took my first deepsky astrophoto from the Great Orion Nebula with the ED90/500.
Due to astrophotography I got in touch closely with photography itself and so daytime photography
became my second hobby.
I try to use all variations of photography including timelapse, macro, panorama and so on.
Since 2007 I have been working as a biomedical scientist at the Institute of Immunology in Vienna where my main work is to typecast leucaemias in peripheral blood and bonemarrow with a cytometer.
In May 2012 I married my beautiful wife Sabrina and two years later in March our lovely son Noah was born. In November 2015 our second son Maximilian was born.
The astronomers family grows ;-)
Since October 2015 i work beside my job as a professional photographer.