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Mermaid


JawD

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Huh? Why Mermaid? Well, in my quest to be different I just couldnt bring myself to write "hello" or "im new". I happen to have a wooden mermaid (another story) on my window ledge in this room and it's the first thing I looked at when thinking of a thread title.

So, that aside, I'm new! yeah, I could have just said that buy being that this post is in here then... woooaaah hang on. I've gone off on one a bit havent I?

Ok, starting over...

I'm a bit of a photographer (for fun, not work) and shoot with a Nikon D7000. While I enjoy many types of photographing, landscape and nature has been my preference. I like being outdoors. With my job I drive around a bit and the camera often sits in my car boot. Now and again I'll pull over and grab an image. When the dark evenings are around, I find myself pulling over and just staring at the sky. I love the escapism. I could sit and stare all night. As I drive places like the A66 over the hills there is little light pollution and the views are stunning.

Anyway, with my DSLR I have taken many of the standard moon shots and some star trails with longer exposures. I have had a desire though to step in to astrophotography. It just seems the natural progression.

So that in turn brought me here. Hello!

Gear wise I'm resisting the tempation to jump in face first but I do have my eye on *this*

With my 40th (yeah ok, there I said it....) coming up soon my wife has promised me a treat and this could be it. I'm still researching this though so we'll see.

Before that though after reading other advice, my next purchase may actually be *these* - again, any input in to that is welcome.

So, other than that, some useless info about me is that I live just outside of Durham, married, 2 kids, run own unrelated business and I turn 40 in oh.... 2 weeks :)

There we go :hello2:

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Hi and welcome to the forum. First off, hold fire any purchase until you have got yourself a copy of Steve Richards' "Making Every Photon Count"(FLO £19.99). A comprehensive guide on what you need and why you need it to obtain the level of imaging that you are after. It will help provide you with sufficient detail to help you make an informed choice and to construct a realistic budget - in fact this book might even save you money! To image the moon and planets requires a simple webcam and a free program called registax to help you stack the best 'frames' to construct a composite final image. The fun (frustration?) starts in fact with deep sky objects (DSO's) such as galaxies and nebula. The mount is your starting point and it needs to be sufficiently accurate to track these faint objects as you will need longer exposures to capture sufficient data. Quite different from planets/moon which are intrinsically brighter being nearer our star, the sun. Check out to see what most imagers on here are using (no need to reinvent the wheel as they say) and you will see plenty of HEQ5's and NEQ6 and upwards which are not cheap but importantly facilitate better control over the tracking accuracy. This kind of detail is supplied in the above book as well as on the imaging section within this forum. One last point on imaging. Much is made of the kit required to collect the data but do not forget the requirements of processing this data to construct the final image. A lot of really good software can be downloaded free but of course there are some great 'toys' that you will have to pay for and so should also be included in your budget.

Lastly, the 'binos' you linked to are really good and would certainly recommend them. They are a little heavy to be holding up all night if you want a steady image so a good tripod would help you. You might want to replace the plastic 'L' bracket that helps connect it to a tripod with something a little bit more sturdy! Overall, please research as much as possible and by that I mean asks questions and see what everybody else uses - they have done the hard work for you!

Clear skies

James

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Thanks all. Ive ordered that book as recommended so cheers for that. Also got them bino's on order. Holding off on the other bits until I read more.

And yeah, I think that's my wife's intention!

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