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Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your wallets


Andy69

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This article considers the financial perils of astro-photography, because while a hobby like Astronomy can at times leave you financially challenged, nothing is quite so fiscally ruinous as deciding it would be a jolly good idea to fasten a camera to your telescope.

There are many reasons you might consider taking up astrophotography. Perhaps, as your eyesight slowly declines from the hawk like clarity of youth to Mr Magoo myopia in your advancing years, astro-imaging appeals as a way of extending your hobby into pensionerhood. Or it might be that you’re fed up of seeing things like the Andromeda galaxy and the Orion Nebula as greyish blobs and smudges and instead yearn to produce the same beautifully detailed, colourful pictures you see in the astronomy press.

There is absolutely no doubt the images amateur astronomers produce are incredible. At first glance you’d think they had come from the Hubble space telescope rather than a man in a shed somewhere in Liverpool. They are impressive not least for the fact they may well have used a telescope much like the one you already own, so the equipment must surely be quite modest in its expense.

Interesting word though ‘modest’. It makes it sound like it could mean fairly cheap. Not bargain basement certainly, but definitely somewhere around ‘affordable’. When it comes to the cost of astrophotography though ‘modest’ means cheap in much the same way a telescope like Hubble is ‘affordable’. It could be reasonably argued that the theory of black holes was dreamt up by someone bitten by the astrophotography bug to try and explain where all their money had disappeared to.

Like all addictions it will start innocently enough. This one will start with a web cam. You might even buy a cheap one from Asda and modify it yourself for astronomy purposes saving a bit of money. This is your last chance to kick the habit before it really gets its hooks into you. Only if you fail to correctly modify that web cam and end up ‘fixing it’ with a hammer in a haze of red mist and frustration will you escape its clutches. Should you succeed and manage to get the thing working you will be lost.

The web cam will last you a little while but once you've captured a picture of Jupiter that you’re really happy with you’ll begin to feel the itch of deep sky objects and to scratch that itch you’re going to need a second mortgage.

Where to begin? Firstly you’re going to need a camera.

As you are not quite fully in the grip of your astrophotography habit yet you’ll make the concession of buying a DSLR Camera. You’ll justify the expense by telling yourself you will be able to use it as a ‘normal’ camera and take holiday photo’s and pictures of robins on your bird table in winter. And you might very well start out that way but then you’ll read an article on disabling the infra red filter and that will be that for the sandcastles and robins.

If you have a shed you’ll begin to think of it as your observatory and draw up plans to modify it to have a roll off roof. But to fit the rollers you’ll have to take the roof off and to fit the pier for the expensive new mount you’re going to buy, you’ll have to take the floor up. This will cause your shed to fall down so you’ll end up rebuilding it. However the new shed/observatory will be twice the size of the old one once you've added the essential warm room and kitchen area.

So, you've built a new shed and installed a pier, bought the camera, and at least a NEQ6 Pro mount,. But it’s only just begun. You’ll need a guider scope, off axis guider, laptop, full set of colour filters with wheel, narrowband filters, light pollution filters, the list goes on. Then you’ll look at your telescope and decide you need a different one, which when it arrives you’ll modify, changing the focuser and adding a home-made cooling solution you saw on astronomy shed.

If you are not an eccentric millionaire you’re now at the point where you need Bob Geldof to organise a charity concert to pay off your debts. So before you start your next round of upgrades you’ll do some imaging which will involve taking up permanent residence in your shed/observatory. There are two main reasons for this. First it’s where you now spend all of your waking hours fiddling with your equipment, taking many millions of exposures and practicing the dark arts of image processing. The second reason you’ll spend all of your time there is because your house has been repossessed and this is now your home.

Finally, after the flats and darks have been taken, the data crunched and the final tweaking of levels in Photoshop has brought out the dust lanes in Andromeda just so, you’ll post your masterpiece online. The accolades from your peers will be justifiably fulsome in their praise and all the hard work and sacrifice will have been worth it. That is until some nit picking, pedant will point out a minor aberration in an unimportant part of your image. Once the twitching has subsided and your blood pressure has returned to a level no longer considered ‘dangerously high’ you’ll have no option but to reach for your credit card and buy some more kit. Let’s see now, £6000 for a proper mount, hmm, maybe I can sell a kidney.

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So, so true! I am £10,000 into the hole. And I have the world's best collection of pictures of the underside of clouds. Light ones, dark ones. Those misty ones that fool you into thinking it's final clear. I even managed to get a fairly decent shot of an airplane! (http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/228821-aircraft-flies-through-m31/#entry2483897 and scroll down to my post.)

 

Currently saving up to design and build a laser array that will evaporate the clouds above me.

 

What do you mean - clouds *are* evaporated water?

 

B*gger!

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So, so true! I am £10,000 into the hole. And I have the world's best collection of pictures of the underside of clouds. Light ones, dark ones. Those misty ones that fool you into thinking it's final clear. I even managed to get a fairly decent shot of an airplane! (http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/228821-aircraft-flies-through-m31/#entry2483897 and scroll down to my post.)

 

Currently saving up to design and build a laser array that will evaporate the clouds above me.

 

What do you mean - clouds *are* evaporated water?

 

B*gger!

Wow, not sure which is more impressive the £10k spent (so far) or the photo of the plane.  Good work on both though :)

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O. M. G! I fell out of my chair! No, seriously, I have a balance prob.... no I don't - I was, erm, laughing too hard.

 

Nail. Head. Bang on, LOL!

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