Astronomy photographers?

phildaintith

phildaintith

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Some of you may know what i'm obsessed with shooting at night and the whole star trails & light painting thing, but i want to look a bit closer at the sky and try some astronomy phoptography...

To be honest i have no idea where to start, i know you can get attachments for telescopes but am not sure which are compatable with my 5dii, i also have no idea how much i should be looking to spend. would i be able to pick anything half decent up off ebay etc for 100 ish or below?

Maybe you have seen reviews online somewhere that you could link me to?

Hope some of you can help me out here :)

www.explorethenight.co.uk
 
You'll need a camera-specific 'T-Ring' which replaces the lens on your camera, which couples to a 'T-Adaptor' which screws onto the telescope. See here.

The Meade ETX range are very good telescopes and have been around long enough to appear regularly on the auction sites (I've had mine for about twenty years). The peripheral bits are a bit plasticky but the optical tube assembly (OTA) is aluminium and the optics themselves are superb.

Have a read through the astrophotography articles on Mike Weasner's ETX site. There are also articles on imaging with individual cameras there.
 
ive wanted to do some astrophotography as well so this info about how T ring and adapters is great!

ive also wondered about how to connect my camera to a microscope for insane macro shots but i guess that's another thread entirely!
 
I've been thinking about this for a while. We've got an old telescope (it was pretty cheap, but a proper one, not a toy one or anything). I've never used it and have no idea about it, but looks like it only costs ~ 30 quid for a ring and an adapter, so I might have a look into this..
 
The main problem is that the stars move (well, the Earth moves). And they're pretty dim so you need a long exposure. That means you have to move the camera to track the stars. Google 'barn door tracker' for the cheap way of doing this and 'equatorial mount' for the expensive way.
 
There is a way of simulating the effect of long exposures, use stacking software. Instead of one long exposure possibly of a few hours, which the less expensive telescopes aren't sufficiently accurate to track precisely, you take many shorter exposures of a few seconds to a minute or so. The stacking software then adds the shots together, a bit of post processing and there you go.

Having said that, you only really need the long exposures for things like galaxies and nebulae, which are very very dim. If you're in a city they're probably dimmer than the background light level of the night sky. Go for things like star clusters, Jupiter (very prominent at the moment) Saturn and of course the Moon. The ETX range I mentioned earlier can track satellites, so how about trying for a shot of the International Space Station?
 
phildaintith said:
Some of you may know what i'm obsessed with shooting at night and the whole star trails & light painting thing, but i want to look a bit closer at the sky and try some astronomy phoptography...

To be honest i have no idea where to start, i know you can get attachments for telescopes but am not sure which are compatable with my 5dii, i also have no idea how much i should be looking to spend. would i be able to pick anything half decent up off ebay etc for 100 ish or below?

Maybe you have seen reviews online somewhere that you could link me to?

Hope some of you can help me out here :)

www.explorethenight.co.uk
Click to expand...


It depends on what you are trying to capture?

As said previously you really will need some way of tracking as even a few seconds will cause trailing. If you want to do planets then you could get away with short exposures and stack them but you will still need to reposition the scope also a DSLR isn't the best choice for planets as the image will be far too small, but it would be great for deeper wide-field stuff and for that a small scope will suffice as would camera lenses. I would suggest getting hold of a decent tracking mount and having a go with your existing kit.
 
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