Even as a small child, I was fascinated by looking at the night sky and wanted to know everything about it. When I was in school, I received a simple telescope as a gift and finally could bring the moon closer with its crater landscapes and even see Saturn and Jupiter, albeit small and blurry.

Later, during my time in high school, I joined the astronomy club where I met Hans-Winfried Auel and together we developed a glow-in-the-dark star map that showed the entire night sky as a poster at a glance. Based on that, we created the multimedia presentation "Journey through the Night Sky," which we presented live to audiences of up to 800 visitors until the early 2000s. During the same period, we also wrote a monthly column about the current night sky for the Hessisch-Niedersächsische-Allgemeine (HNA) newspaper.

Music is my second passion, and I have also made it my profession: I am a professional pianist and componist specializing in jazz. I perform concerts with various projects that have taken me to many countries around the world. I have appeared on radio and television, and my music can be heard on numerous CDs. I also teach piano at universities and music schools. If you want to know more about it, check my music website at www.markus-horn.net

I didn't start photography until 1998 when I wanted to try out a new hobby, and I mainly focused on portrait photography. It wasn't until the end of 2020 that I attempted to photograph the moon through my Newtonian telescope and since then, I have been dedicated to astrophotography!

I still vividly remember hanging a large poster of the Horsehead Nebula in my room as a teenager in the 1980s and marveling at it. The fact that 35 years later I would be able to capture it myself from my backyard shows how far technology has advanced since then. Nevertheless, I still consider every astrophotograph I take as a little miracle!