advice on astrophotography

[craigguk]

hi im seeking help im looking into potentially upgrading my telescope right now i have a celestron lcm 114 i have 2 other optical tubes 1 is celestron powerseeker 114 and the other is an older version of the skywatcher explorer 130mm. im unsure if im doing the imaging right for planets camera im using for the planets is ZWO ASI120MC-S. i want to put a bit more focus into capturing deep sky objects and use my camera a nikon d3100 at the moment with just a lense untracked im not entirely sure if my expectations are abit too high for what i want to achieve but ill share some examples i have a budget of around 300-400 i wanted to try here before spending more money on an already growing set of optical tubes. would really apprechiate some advice and any reccomendations

 

Edited November 19, 2021 by craigguk

[iapa]

I would be tempted to upgrade the mount first as it’s quite lightweight.

A couple of thing people have done with similar light tripods is

• fill the legs with sand
• several 1L bottles of water on the tray, and hang some from the tray as well
• when Imaging, keep the legs as short as possible

That should make it more stable.

As the focus plane of the tubes is likely more than 55mm from camera sensor, I think you will probably want to get a 1.25” Barlow c£25 and a T2 - Nikon adapter, c£30 to connect the Barlow to the camera.

That should be a reasonable starting point.

FYI my first set up was Nikon D90 with T2 adapter, 2x Barlow and the Celestron SLT130 and I used the water bottle idea to improve stability.

[iapa]

I just spotted this 

 on the for sale section.

It looks like a good starter mount for the tubes you have.