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- Name
- David
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I used to be a keen astrophotographer but finally ended up selling all my kit a couple of years ago because of the setup time and the British weather.
Things have evolved and SMART telescopes seem to be the new thing.
I have been very wary of trying one as they seem too good to be true.
A friend bought two DWARF II smart telescopes by mistake from a Kickstarter project over a year ago. and very kindly gave one to me last week.
They now retail at about £500 and are so small and lightweight I thought they were a toy. How wrong was I?
I chose an easy target for my first test: The Orion Nebula.
The image below took less that 30 minutes from stepping outside the front door with the DWARF II to a final stacked image.
You control the scope using your mobile phone and select your target the scope moves to point at it and then you simply tell it how many images to take. It then takes a series of images and stacks them to improve the detail and clarity. (This was 50 x 10 sec images)
This second image: The Rosette Nebula is a more difficult target as it is very feint and needs a lot of data. So this is a stack of 200 x 15sec images. This took just over an hour. I have done a bit more post-processing in PS to make it a bit better.
So I am very impressed with what this kit can deliver and it opens up a lot of opportunities to take astro shots between clouds.
Things have evolved and SMART telescopes seem to be the new thing.
I have been very wary of trying one as they seem too good to be true.
A friend bought two DWARF II smart telescopes by mistake from a Kickstarter project over a year ago. and very kindly gave one to me last week.
They now retail at about £500 and are so small and lightweight I thought they were a toy. How wrong was I?
I chose an easy target for my first test: The Orion Nebula.
The image below took less that 30 minutes from stepping outside the front door with the DWARF II to a final stacked image.
You control the scope using your mobile phone and select your target the scope moves to point at it and then you simply tell it how many images to take. It then takes a series of images and stacks them to improve the detail and clarity. (This was 50 x 10 sec images)
This second image: The Rosette Nebula is a more difficult target as it is very feint and needs a lot of data. So this is a stack of 200 x 15sec images. This took just over an hour. I have done a bit more post-processing in PS to make it a bit better.
So I am very impressed with what this kit can deliver and it opens up a lot of opportunities to take astro shots between clouds.
