• 10 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Yeah, it can be pretty expensive. Some tips:

    • figure out if you want a photography kit you can also use for astrophotography or something more dedicated to astrophotography like a telescope you can put a camera in.
    • camera equipment is a lot cheaper used.
    • A lot of deep space objects are most visible in infrared, a camera without IR filter can capture this but wont be much use for anything else.
    • the old astrophotography reddit is a great place to learn about equipment tradeoffs as all photos are posted with equipment details. Makes it easier to learn what you can realistically capture and what requires 10x your budget.




  • Two things help a lot:

    • Tracking, either with a proper telescope mount or as I did, a star adventurer. You align it using the pole star, then it rotates the same speed as earth, counteracting the rotation so the sky stays in the same location relative to your camera.
    • Stacking, even with tracking I typically dont get longer than 1-3min exposures. So instead take multiple and stack the images in software. This image is 14x 100s exposures.

    But, even without any of those, I’ve taken images of the Orion Nebulae with just a tripod. It will be a lot blurrier and noisier and generally worse, but its pretty cool to see it show up anyway.