My Forays Into Astrophotography
I’ve been interested in astrophotography for a number of years and dabbled with it on and off, taking the ubiquitous star trail type images and also using a barn door mount for taking longer exposures.
It was only after I bought a telescope that I became any way serious about astrophotography. Below you’ll find a number of photos I’ve taken in the past with my equipment, a Vixen VC200L 8″ reflector, an f/6.4 focal reducer, an old Olympus OM-1 camera and Starlight Xpress CCD cameras. Unfortunately, many of these photos have been lost over the years through changing PCs and webservers.
In order to get into imaging, I needed a permanent setup which would allow for quick set-up and take-down times to take advantage of good observing conditions and to protect equipment when the rain rolled in. So I built an observatory. The details of the construction process are in my Building Your Own Observatory article. The observatory also provides some protection from wind although, where I live, the observatory sits in something of a wind tunnel! Having tried imaging with and without an observatory, I can definitely recommend buying/building/using one as it gives you more time for imaging and observing and cuts down on the frustration of having spent time setting up only to have to take it all down again because the clouds have rolled in or its started raining!
At one stage, I got into receiving weather satellite images which were downloaded and processed on the PC. Unfortunately, a number of those satellites are no longer functioning (particularly the Russian ones) and newer technology has meant different receiver systems are now needed to pick up images. However, the resolution of these images is much higher than the ones I used to pick up but the receivers are proportionally more expensive.
For books on astrophotography and high-end observatory systems, see the end of the page.
I’m documenting my progress back into astrophotgraphy at this blog, after a number of years absence.
I started my journey back to astrophotography by replacing my GP-DX mount with an EQ6 Pro. While the mount is excellent, taking images with pinpoint stars through an 1800mm scope is problematical. Any deviation due to the scope not being adequately polar aligned, periodic errors in the mount or vibrations induced from other sources show up in blurred or trailed star images. The solution was to get an autoguider and the one I picked was the LVI Smartguider. Buying one from Germany instead of the UK saved me 40% on the price!
Once I get the LVI Smartguider up and running, I’ll start adding new images to this page.
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