New Here, FULL of questions

[tothestars]

Ok ill take this slowly if i can, first off i am a professional photographer in Maine and while sitting around i decided the other day to research star trails, i blame this website for my new addiction lol

How To: Star trails – Stacking with StarTrails.exe

Heres some stuff i would like help advice with.

1. I know how to do star trails , and indeed i can also shoot the sky with a 30 second exposure without trails, heres the part i must be lost at.

I have SEEN people on the web post AMAZING photos of the moon and the stars, planets etc they say they get these buy taking photos through their telescope, like a little kid (which i am not) i dug out a telescope that was given to me last year in hopes i could get a pic of the crescent moon tonight, didnt happen lol

The telescope i am using is a "Jason Discoverer 313 made with Toma? optics, and apparently they are rare or something, made in 1977, i focused it on the moon (which was upside down but everything is on that thing lol) and then i put my alpha 350 lense against the eyepice and tried a few pics, yeah that didnt happen, though i bet a photo of the moon as i could see it through the scope would be amazing. I looked the telescope and its tripod (which has tons of dials and 0-24 metal wheels on it, degrees> azimuth, declanation? hours? lol who knows) and couldnt see anything to REMOVE to get the pic to come out, it got cold so i gave up.

What am i missing, i can take some pretty neat star trails photos, but what do i got to do to get those "ooh ahh" telescope photos?

thanks for cluing me in on this and what those dials do, or used to do lol

talk to you soon, must go get my camera off the roof, its doing some more star trails

Jay

[yeti monster]

Welcome to SGL Jay.

I'm no imager, and these sorts of quiries have raised themselves in my head too.

As far as I can gather, the astro imagers have their camera sensor positioned at the "sweet spot", which I take as the focal point of the telescope (with no eyepiece fitted, although they do use a barlow lens sometimes, which will increase the magnification of the focal point image. The camera is mounted as per an eyepiece, in the telescope focuser, and positioned so as to capture the focused image.

They take exceedingly long exposures, several of them, using red, blue and green filters, along with various other filters, of which I know only that they are a black art.

In addition they take "darks" and "flats", again these are plain witchcraft to which I, being a mere mortal, have no access.

Once they have what must amount to 4 terabytes of data they then lock themselves away from the harmful rays of the sun for several weeks/months performing ancient rituals, called "stacking".

Then, and only then, do they post their images to make me, and other non-imagers sick with envy.

HTH

YM

[Demonperformer]

Hi and welcome

I have taken a few pictures by holding a camera lens against an eyepiece. You need to have a fairly long focal length eyepiece for this to work [short focal length eyepieces have a narrower cone of light and it is harder to find it - at least that is what I have found].

Really, if you want to do photography with the eyepiece in you need a connector that holds everything in place, lined up, as you take the photo. The alternative is to remove the eyepiece and camera lens and connect them directly with an adaptor, so that the telescope is acting as your camera lens, via a T-ring.

Adaptors - T Rings

Adaptors - 1.25" T mount camera adapter

Then things start to get interesting [and expensive!!]

Hope this helps.

[Sam]

Welcome to SGL Jay, you're embarking on a very complex journey - good on you!!!! There's a wealth of information on here in the imaging section and also the equipment section. More importantly there's a whole bunch of very accomplished imagers who will help you out along the way. Now I'm no accomplished imager but will help where I can.

I use a DSLR that sits in the focuser of the telescope, in my case a 10" reflector. This all sits on an equatorial mount so it can track the movement of the sky. In addition I have another telescope that piggy backs on the main scope with a little webcam attached to it. This is used to guide the scope with software that sends commands to the mount to keep the stars centred to avoid star trails in long exposures.

There's a nearly endless range of possibilities with astro imaging in the way of equipment and software and you can achieve some quite amazing results with modest equipment. Probably the most important thing to start with is a sturdy and accurate mount.

Sam

[Capricorn]

For a first step you will need to set up the equatorial mount accurately and it will need to have motors. The motors drive the scope at the same rate as the earths rotation so no trails. Slight hiccup, the moon still moves relative to the stars.

The impressive pictures that you see are actually many stacked one on top of another. Each image is taken and at each exposure the image captures a little bit of the colour/detail and when stacked they add up and you get the colour/detail coming through.

You can track with just the motors or as said with a guide scope. The guide scope will be better but more complex and costly to start up.

The scope generally used to image is often a good 80mm refractor, so not that big. The idea being you take lots of images (200?) then stack (add) them together. The software to stack can be obtained from the web free . As I recall you specify an accuracy/quality for the image taken and the software "measures" the image and if good enough then it is stacked, otherwise discarded.

Not sure the A350 will take images of say 2 minute duration and 250 in count.

Not sure about the moon, but you will still need motors to simply track as best as possible. Would have thought that a good standard lens on the A350 and good tracking would have produced an image of use.

[brantuk]

Hi Jay

First off here's a link to a manual for your scope in case you don't have one:

http://geogdata.csun.edu/~voltaire/classics/jason/jason313.pdf

Your question is quite a big one and Yeti says it all really in a very amusing way. The "wow factor" comes from tracking objects electronically for lengthy periods using long expposure photography and gathering hundreds (sometimes thousands) of frames. These are then aligned and stacked using computer software picking only the best frames.

It is possible to put a camera up to the lense and snap away a few short exposures under specific conditions, but the good shots come from accurate tracking, cooled ccd cameras, specialised filters, and a host of other variables.

You can use a webcam to get some reasonable shots of the solar system as a cheap way into the hobby, but be warned - once you're hooked it's like a being a gambling addict who never sees his wage packet lol

[tothestars]

Just wanted to say THANKS for the awesome replies, you people are real helpful, yes i can see how this could get addictive. To answer one of the comments the A350 DID take good star trails, however i just was not sure if it was at caliber for some of the more "intense" images i have seen people create with telescopes.

Also someone mentioned something about lenses, the A350 i use has a 18-70 mm and also a 55-200 mm lens setup, however when i tried to take a pic through the eyepiece of the telescope last night all i saw was blackness, i am QUITE SURE i did not set it up right (my steps were to get the moon sighted in the telescope finder, then lock it in on the main scope, then i focused it sharply, then i took another tripod and put the A350's lens right up against the scope eyepiece, all i got was a black pic lol!

Ok thanks again and to answer someone's other comment i am sure the A350 can do a 2 minute exposure and 250 in count, i did 360 30 second shots and stacked them (i am quite familiar with the method) to get the results of some of these photos.

The start of my trip into this part of photography can be viewed here

First ever Star Trails Experiment

(image composed of a set of 225 30 second exposures shot at ISO 800 on a clear night sky)

Second run at it

(Image composed of a set of 330 images at 30 second exposure with ISO 1600 during the aurora and a partly cloudy sky

Third try with neat results

(Image composed of a set of 120 images at 30 second exposure with an ISO 3200, center is the pole star resulting from the "pinwheel effect", light pollution at bottom left corner)

so once again thanks, any thoughts ideas (i really don't want to spend a "ton" of cash on this, i have no issues getting some things, but if what i have can work i would love for someone to EXPLAIN how to get my scope to take pics, as for tracking not too important, but would love a shot of the moon through the scope, i'm just lost how to do it, if my scope is junk ill get something else, just starting here and the trails are already addictive alone lol

keep em coming, let me know what you think about my photos!

[Astro_Baby]

Jay - the scope is made most likley by Towa. They made a lot of scopes back in the 70s and 80s and went out under all sorts of brand names.

The scopes a good bit of kit ( I did some fast research on it as old scopes are a bit of interest to me) and I would guess it was a rival to the Tasco scopes were aroun in the lates 70s and early 80s, that were still of good quality. Tasco scopes from the 70s bear no relationship other than the name to Tasco today.

ANyway the scopes a good quality bit of kit - not tremoundously valuable (a quick zip around the CN classics forums would suggest it might fetch £50 to £100 depending but I'd do some proper research if you ever sell it).

Pictures - well to get serious quality astro pics is a real art as well as a science and its generally pretty expensive. At the low end you would need at least a mount that can track the stars/planets.

The simplest type of photography is called afocal and its basically all about holding the camera to the eyepiece and taking snaps through the eyepiece. With heavy camera and a relatively feeble mount for the scope this may be hard. I did a few just for my own amusement by having the camera on a tripod positioned so that it was looking down the eyepiece of the telescope with a dark cloth over the gap so stop stray light. It kind of works but the quality wasn't great but then I was just messing about with a happy snappy cam at the time.

Theres a biggish guide to astro-imaging on the cheap here Astrophotography with a Small Telescope which may be of some help.

There are plenty of imagers on this site who will doubtless be able to help more but its a super steep learning curve. If its something your really interested in longer term then I'd suggest getting a book called 'Making every Photon Count' by our very own Steppenwolf on here because that explains all the issues very simply (or at least as simply as it can be made).

Heres a few pics I took with a really cheap happy snappy-o-cam down the eyepiece of a Sky-Watcher 130.

[Astro_Baby]

oh and ps - if that old scope has a sun filter the best thing you can do with it is chuck it in the bin. Failing that make a note never to use it. Old scopes often came with them and they are dangerous bits of kit.

[tothestars]

As you all probably know i DOUBT the mount that came with the original scope was the one i received. To be honest this mount looks VERY homemade, and the top of the tripod has some strange things on it, but it is OBVIOUS the person who made it put a lot of love into it.

i have uploade a few pics, maybe someone can help identify what this stuff does for me, and if it might help me at all, also can someone provide a link to a photo perhaps that was taken (by putting the camera lens up to the viewscope) i am just curious to see how it turned out, hope the photos help!

[John]

Actually that mount is not home made. It's a older version of a mount that is marketed today by Skywatcher - the EQ2.

To help identify what bit does what, here is a link to a user manual for another scope on that mount - you will recognise many of the parts I hope !:

http://www.opticalvision.co.uk/documents/6.pdf

The above manual gives you some basic information on setting the mount up but I'm sure you will have some more questions so fire away !. The first thing you will need to do (it's a one-off operation) is to set the altitude scale to match your local latitude - the manual shows you where this is in figure E on page 6.

[yeti monster]

That looks like a purposful little mount, if a trifle agricultural, but then they were in those days (at least my Prinz one is).

What are the "strange things" of which you speak?

[tothestars]

Lol, i meant "strange" to me, once again INVALUABLE help, i will review all this,maybe i can figure out this stuff after all, i was going to throw that mount away, but now with some guidance ill give it a go in its understanding.

[orionhunter]

this is what you call home made.

ive made a similar one.