Back in the ancient history of my youth, astrophotography was an incredibly complex and expensive venture and you really had to know what you were doing. Imaging with film required special equipment and hours of pinpoint tracking with equatorial mounts, sometimes over multiple nights. This was definitely for the hardcore! But about 10 or 15 years ago, the manufacture of new image sensors allowed for the development of the DSLR and phone camera and that has revolutionized astrophotography. You can still spend in the tens of thousands of dollars on astrophotography if you are really into it, but now you can get more than decent images with your DSLR or even your iPhone using prime focus or afocal methods. And with free "stacking" software, you can even use an alt-azimuth mount with limited exposure times to get some fine pictures.
Now, I know I will not be getting images that match what you see from the Hubble Space Telescope or the fly-bys of Jupiter or Saturn. But I wanted to see what I could do without spending an excessive amount of money. With the short focal length of the Starblast and the pretty light weight limit of the tracking mount, I was a little concerned about the results I might get attempting the prime focus method with my DSLR. And after looking at what Andrew Symes and Mike Weasner had been able to do using the afocal method with their iPhone, I decided that was the way to go.
So here is the equipment I ended up with for a total cost of under 500 dollars:
- Orion Starblast 114mm with AutoTracker Mount and Beginner Barlow (2x) Kit with 10mm and 25MM eypieces
- Orion SteadyPix Universal Smartphone Telescope Photo Mount
- 1.25" Orion Variable Polarizing Filter
- Orion Tri-Mag 1.25" 3x Barlow Lens
This will truly be astrophotography on the cheap! So, I hope you will follow me on this little adventure and perhaps we can learn a thing or two along the way. I will be posting my various attempts and failures as they occur in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment