Astrophotography

DaveH

DaveH

Striker
Picking up a dicussion from the competition thread - @Cow
I’ve got the same tracker as you, Star Adventurer, and the same dslr! One thing I don’t think I’ve got is the right weights for it, what do you use?

Once you’ve got the pole star aligned do you not find as soon as you left go of the controls it knocks it out of alignment?

I’ve never heard of that method before, taking a video and letting the software do the work, makes sense when you say it.

I’ll have a Google of your telescope, we’re in the market for one soon-ish so just starting out with research.
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If I'm only using the camera then I don't use any weights at all. Rather than the long dovetail bar you should have also got a short round mount. I put a ball-head on top of there and begin. I did some shots of Andromeda a few weeks ago and got a small amount of star trailing doing that at 90 second exposures. I had a right time aligning it as the little red light thing you pop in had broken and I was trying to do it while shining a torch down the polar scope!

I've only got a couple of lenses, a 18-55mm which I use for wider star fields and 75-300mm which I was using at full zoom. If you have a bigger heavier lens then you need the bar and weight, but that needs to be balanced. What I would do is losen the clutch so the main bit of the mount spins easily and then adjust the weight position so it is reasonably balanced.

The tripod you use makes a big difference though. I was using a cheap £15 one from Amazon, which is fine for quick bits of standard photography and is nice and light to carry. For the weight of my star adventurer, I got a Manfrotto 055. Check out the second hand market.

It is worth having a look on StarGazersLounge, there are a few threads on there:
stargazerslounge.com

Star Adventurer Tripod

Hi Folks, Quick question, anybody purchased the star adventurer tripod. Looks reasonably priced at around £60 with a max payload of 15kg. Better alternatives at a similar price? Thanks for your help Simon
stargazerslounge.com stargazerslounge.com
This thread is a good one and this post was the result of my research into decent but affordable tripods I was watching ebay for:
stargazerslounge.com

Imaging with a Star Adventurer

stargazerslounge.com stargazerslounge.com

If you think you are going to do more astrophotography with a telescope, then one like mine is not a great choice. That is an altz mount rather than an equatorial. That means it moves left, right, up and down, rather than follow the rotatation of the earth. It is great for planets and the moon, but bad for deep sky objects. If you just want a scope for imaging then seek some advice but I was thinking of a skywatcher 72ED and putting that on top of my SA mount. A number of people have used the William Optics RedCat and got some stunning results, but they are quite expensive.
 


Thanks for posting this thread Dave, seems like there's so much choice out there for everything to do with astrophotography it's a nightmare to narrow it down.

A question on equatorial mounts, I'm hoping to go to Mexico in 2024 to see the eclipse and ideally want to do a timelapse of the whole thing. I've got a Nikon D3000 and a 300mm lens, which should see the sun fill the frame nicely, a solar filter should be easy enough to do as well, but finding a mount that can track the movement of the sun across the sky seems to keep producing mixed results, ranging from around £100 up to north of £1000. Have you got any recommendations? I'm under no illusions it won't be cheap.

If I can get the kit sorted soon, I can spend the next 18 months trying to figure out the exposure settings for the each stage of the partial eclipse and for totality. Then just pray for a clear day.
 
Mally Mackem said:
canny look at mars tonight if anyones interested very close to the moon had some canny views earlier throgh my 25x70 skymasters when it was right next to it.. drifting away now
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Get up just before 5am and Mars will slip behind the moon

See Mars disappear behind the Moon tomorrow morning, 8 December | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

See a lunar occultation of the Red Planet as it reaches opposition. Plus, find out how you can watch the Mars occultation live online.
www.skyatnightmagazine.com
 
I did astrophotography for over ten years, before having to pack it in due to health problems.

I used the 055XB with the Astrotrac for widefield. The two main issues with DSLR lenses are focus and chromatic aberration. You can get around the difficulties of fine focus by using good quality manual focusing primes like Samyang XPs but anything over c.100mm focal length will show blue halos on stars (not all colours are correctly corrected by the achromatic optics in DSLR lenses). You need an apo lens or telescope for this. I bought 40 year old 180mm Leica apo off ebay which is pretty well corrected, but still not as good as a telescope of the same price. Telescopes (unless they're super expensive quadruplets like the Takahashi FSQ) tend to have a curved field and vignetting though, so you need to invest in a field flattener.

DSLRs are also poor for Hydrogen alpha sensitivity due the harsh cut off on the IR filter, but can be homebrew modded to fix this.
 
smoker said:
I did astrophotography for over ten years, before having to pack it in due to health problems.

I used the 055XB with the Astrotrac for widefield. The two main issues with DSLR lenses are focus and chromatic aberration. You can get around the difficulties of fine focus by using good quality manual focusing primes like Samyang XPs but anything over c.100mm focal length will show blue halos on stars (not all colours are correctly corrected by the achromatic optics in DSLR lenses). You need an apo lens or telescope for this. I bought 40 year old 180mm Leica apo off ebay which is pretty well corrected, but still not as good as a telescope of the same price. Telescopes (unless they're super expensive quadruplets like the Takahashi FSQ) tend to have a curved field and vignetting though, so you need to invest in a field flattener.

DSLRs are also poor for Hydrogen alpha sensitivity due the harsh cut off on the IR filter, but can be homebrew modded to fix this.
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My next astro purchase is likely to be a photography refractor, rather than a DSLR lens
 
phil said:
william optics do some great little refractors, mount one on an eq3 Pro synscan and you have real potential for some great photos.
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They look good, but are expensive. I’ve been looking at the likes of the Red Cat. I always check what equipment people are using when they post pictures and that is a really common one for stunning pictures.
 
DaveH said:
They look good, but are expensive. I’ve been looking at the likes of the Red Cat. I always check what equipment people are using when they post pictures and that is a really common one for stunning pictures.
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Occasionally you can pick up quite good bargains on ebay. Unfortunately AP is quite an expensive hobby and can get ridiculously expensive if you let it.
 
Do people use any Photoshop type stuff to make the sky stand out and darken the land? I only use a phone but get some reasonably good shots but it almost looks like daylight on land sometimes due to long exposures and high iso's and would like to darken that part only
 
Smiler said:
Do people use any Photoshop type stuff to make the sky stand out and darken the land? I only use a phone but get some reasonably good shots but it almost looks like daylight on land sometimes due to long exposures and high iso's and would like to darken that part only
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Yes. Sometimes people cut out the foreground and darken it before applying it as a layer in front, or do a shorter exposure and stick that in as a front layer
 
DaveH said:
Yes. Sometimes people cut out the foreground and darken it before applying it as a layer in front, or do a shorter exposure and stick that in as a front layer
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What's the best budget option? I don't really want to be paying Adobe lightroom prices as I don't take that many pics I want to touch up
 
Smiler said:
What's the best budget option? I don't really want to be paying Adobe lightroom prices as I don't take that many pics I want to touch up
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I used to use Adobe elements on a lap top . It's good for storing pics and when you learn 'layers' there is a lot you can do. There are loads of help tutorials and it is useful for different levels of ability plus it was not too expensive .
 
Smiler said:
What's the best budget option? I don't really want to be paying Adobe lightroom prices as I don't take that many pics I want to touch up
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Lightroom is a tenner a month on Creative Cloud. If you’re not shooting that often you can just pay it and cancel then rinse and repeat (if you were initially talking about paying it all up front).

I’ve not used anything else for over a decade mind. I tried GIMP once and it was awful to use but that’s probably because I couldn’t be arsed to get over the learning curve.
 

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