Astrophotography Beginner Scope

[fredbloggsXIII]

Hi. I am interested in using my Sony A200 to do some astrophotography. Can anyone recommend a good telescope as a starter? I have looked at a Phenix 150mm (6 inch) on ebay and read some recommendations for a Skywatcher Skyhawk 1145PM. I want to get some nice planet/moon/nebula/start trail shots. Thanks for any advice

[scotastro]

As there are no other posts on this one I'll give you some pointers.

Star trails are easily acheived - set the camera to bulb and ASA to 800 and mount it on a tripod. Open the shutter for one or two minutes. Job done.

Getting images of planets or DSOs is a different matter. The most critical thing for astrophotography if you want stars as nice dots not trails is a very stable motoriesd mount. Neither scope you mentioned has a good enough mount.

Depending on the type of objects you want to image a reflecting telescope is not that useful if you search around SGL on the image posts you will find many people use small aperture (66 to 80mm) apochromatic refractors. These do come at a much higher price than the scopes you mention. The cheaper achromatic telescopes will give pretty good results for the beginner - a Skywatcher Startravel 80 second hand is about £80.

Mounting the camera to telescope requires a T mount or 2" eyepiece adaptor.

As to the equatorial mount the minimum you should get the EQ3-2 with motor drives. Better still is an EQ5 or HEQ5. These can be found at reasoable prices (£150 ish) second hand.

Imaging nebula is a problem for most DSLRs as they have inbuilt filters blocking the red end of the spectrum. The very light the nebula produces. Nikon and Canon DSLR can have the filters changed (costs about £200) I don't know if this is possible with your Sony.

Because of the above your camera will be limited to star clusters and galaxies of which there are lots to image. Planetary imaging is more difficult as you need high magnification to get anything like a decent sized disc of the planet.

An alterantive to an equatorial mount is an Astrotrak

That covers a lot of what you need to know, unfortunately it is probably not what you wanted to hear.

Mike

[Astro_Baby]

Avoid ebay scopes is my advice. If you want to do astroimaging its a whopping learning curve.

You could to widefield stuff (ie mounting the camera on a tracking mount) easy enough. That would get you widefield and star trail photographs. An EQ2 might be bale to pull it off at the cheapest end of the business assuming you have a motor for tracking. As has already been said the EQ3-2 would be better but its more money.

Most small reflectors have trouble with imaging as they lack suficient 'in-focus' - have seen plenty of people pulling their hair out on this on various boards.

Most low cost scopes are going to be problematic with hooking up your DSLR. As much as anything the mount probably wont take the weight but there are other issues too.

Deep sky stuff like nebula require a ton of time and expertise to get decent results.

Surpising the imaging crew on here havent come back on this - I only do visual so cant advice much better than that.

[BlueAstra]

I had the SW 1145P as my first scope. Great for visual, and OK for eyepiece projection photography with a compact camera. On a goto Alt/Az mount I was OK for exposures up to about 20s. The focus distance was too short to allow direct fitting of an DSLR, it would work with a barlow (x2 converter optics) though. I think I would go for a small SCT or APO refractor. If your're serious about photography get a equatorial mount. Look to spend maybe 80% of your budget on the mount, the rest on the scope. The mount is one of the major keys to good photography, and will be useful when you upgrade your scope.

[pvaz]

Hi. I am interested in using my Sony A200 to do some astrophotography. Can anyone recommend a good telescope as a starter? I have looked at a Phenix 150mm (6 inch) on ebay and read some recommendations for a Skywatcher Skyhawk 1145PM. I want to get some nice planet/moon/nebula/start trail shots. Thanks for any advice

I just started and had a bit of the same idea as you. I been in amateur photography for a while now, got 3 DSLRs at home and a few lenses, so I wanted to merge this 2 hobbies. Then I read a lot and found out those pretty deep sky objects images take several hours of pictures with post processing on a computer.

I went for observation only for now.

Here are some of the conclusions I reached after a lot of reading, and averaging the gear used by the best astro photographers here.

Minimum required gear for good (to excellent) results:

-HEQ5 or EQ6 mount

-66 or 80mm APO refractor

-Modified DSLR (renders it unuseful for terrestrial use, or so I think. if I'm wrong please someone correct me).

- A focal reducer for DSOs

- 3x or higher barlow for Planetary, or a modded webcam

(+ lots of time and decication)

Other recommended items:

- DSLR shutter control for long exposure (over the traditional 30", bulb mode on the camera)

- Filters

- Filter wheel

- An Extra, smaller, scope + cheap ccd + laptop for automated guiding and reduced star trails.

- Power supplie pack for mount, laptop, dslr

- Dew control stuff

I have no experience at all, but did a fair amount of research. In the end I came to the conclusion it would be an investment of at least 1000 GBP + loads of patience, and the gear wouldn't be very good for visual observation. Anyway, some of the astrophotography gurus here, will probably show up for a better advice.

Meanwhile you can go to the imaging section read some primers and some similar threads that have been answered.

Cheers

Paulo

[Beyond_Vision]

The real problem there isn't a scope camera combination that does all of the thigs you ask. For planetary imaging you need a telescope with a reasonably long focal length and a small size chip CCD (for magnification) with a high frame rate. Doing DSO imaging with a long focal length scope will be tricky as it's focal ratio will be high and with it's long focal length will make tracking more difficult. The sort of DSO's usually taken with long focal length scopes are galaxies and planetary nebula which are quite small.

For imaging larger DSO's like M45, M42, M31 etc it would be better to start with short focal length lenses or scopes on a reasonably stable driven mount. There are practical limits to using cheaper equatorial mounts and you will probably only get exposures with no trailing for exposure of less than 2 minutes. To get longer exposures you will need to autoguide the mount. This is were you start to spend a lot more money and the complexity increases. The sort of mounts that you can autoguide with cost more than £700 pounds new or £450 secondhand.

I would suggest you pick which area you are more intrested in i.e Lunar, Planetary or DSO widefield or higher magnication. Then pick a set up to suit your choice.

Regards

Kevin

[Beyond_Vision]

-Modified DSLR (renders it unuseful for terrestrial use, or so I think. if I'm wrong please someone correct me).

some primers and some similar threads that have been answered.

Cheers

Paulo

You can use a modded camera for normal photography by using a custom white balance setting but this feature is not available in auto mode. You can use an Astonomik Orignal White Filter to restore the camera to normal.

Regards

Kevin

[Sparrow]

This certainly isn't a cheap hobby but I've gradually stepped up the astrophotography route over the last 18 months bit by bit. I started off with a 6" schmidt telescope and a Meade LPI camera - I got some very pleasing results of the moon - particularly when mosaicing the results. This was a great way to get in to the hobby relatively cheaply and get more of a taste what it's all about. Then I got a 2nd hand Meade DSI camera and entered the wonderful world of deep sky imaging (unguided) This restricted me realistically to about 1 minute exposures - perhaps 1.24 minutes max. Nevertheless this gave me a chance to have a go at the brighter object - M42 is a great one to start out with.

If you want to go in to deep sky imaging seriously then the equipment you will need to get satisfactory results will step up. To get longer exposures you will need two scopes and two cameras (I've gone down the DSLR route for imaging which I'm very happy with at the moment - a much cheaper option that the dedicated astro cameras - mine is an unmodded Canon EOS1000D - I'm eagerly waiting to see how it performs on targets compared to the modded cameras - the built in filter is supposed to be more forgiving than previous DSLRs were.

As for autoguiding, I got a very pleasant surprise - I found I was able to directly connect to the handset controller from the laptop (with appropriate cabling) without the need for a shoestring box. One less expense at least - I've successfully guided up to 15 minute exposures so far.

Telescopes are the real problem. The popular choice seems to be for good quality refractors - I've chosen to go for an 8" reflector instead. I'm not going to enter the debate on that one but that is an area for careful choice.

I would reckon on ultimately spending upwards of £1500 but that doesn't need to be all at one go. If you choose carefully you'll be able to build your kit up a bit at a time. I would definately recommend you give maximum consideration to what mount you choose - If you have a good mount, you can always put a different scope on it later.

Good luck with the hobby - I find it very rewarding and there is a real thrill as the image gradually appears at the processing stage.