Come join the friendliest, most engaging and inclusive astronomy forum geared for beginners and advanced telescope users, astrophotography devotees, plus check out our "Astro" goods vendors.
Come join the friendliest, most engaging and inclusive astronomy forum geared for beginners and advanced telescope users, astrophotography devotees, plus check out our "Astro" goods vendors.
We all started somewhere! We are a friendly bunch! Most of your questions can be posted here, but if you are interested in Astrophotography please use the new Beginner Astrophotography forum. The response time will be much better.
The goal of AP is to create clear color or black & white images of planetary and deep sky objects by substantial digital image manipulation and view them on your laptop/PC. This generally requires the outlay of notable $$$ on gear and software plus considerable time and skill.
Almost by accident I discovered a way to eliminate the middle-man and enjoy that end result - Stellarium has a "Zoom" feature. Just click on any object in that 'sky' and zoom on in. You will get to see a GREAT rendering of that item right there on your laptop/PC. Easy-Peasey and screw the weather and clouds.
You're welcome.
"Don't believe everything you read on the internet." Abraham Lincoln
We may not have it all together, but together we have it all.
The older I get, the better I was.
Celestron Nexstar+ 127 SLT, several budget plossl eyepieces, Celestron 8-24mm zoom EP and a 12.5mm illuminated double reticle EP, Svbony SV205 camera w/.5 focal reducer, Celestron SkyMaster 20x80 binos on a 40 yr old QuickSet PanHead tripod, Stellarium, Sharpcap and ManyCam on my laptop, SkyView and Nightshift on my phone and a dandy little $9 red-light flashlight.
The astrophotography enjoys the process and feeling of achievement of having captured the image themselves (otherwise you could just look at photos from the Hubble Archive.). If you live in the US and pay taxes... this is technically "your" telescope (or some minor fraction thereof ... though I doubt they'll give us use it directly.)
I can't do any imaging or observing from my own home (too many very tall trees) -- other than a narrow piece of sky at the zenith. So I have to pack up the car and head out to a park and this means bringing my own battery power.
So more out of power management than out of cost of a laptop (I already own the laptop so too late to save $$$ there) ... I discovered astrophotography via the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer (SBC). The computer costs $35 USD ... but that does not include a power supply, case, or memory card. The official case is $8. The thing is designed to run off a 5v USB cellphone charger (which most people probably already own). And you do need to buy a microSD card to hold the operating system (about $12).
The advantage to me was ... this thing can run on a cellphone charger (and there are loads of cellphone chargers that can plug into a 12v outlet in a car) and consumes VERY low power. Running an imaging session all night no longer means trying to figure out how to keep a laptop alive and powered for that time.
If you want a turnkey solution you can buy either a ZWO ASIair (mostly designed to run ZWO cameras & accessories but will also run many popular DSLRs) ... or the StellarMate astrophotography "gadget". If you already own the Raspberry Pi (and I have 5 of them laying around) then they'll sell you just the "StellarMate OS" image for about $50 (considering there's almost nothing you can get in astronomy for $50 ... I figured I'd risk the $50.
The StellarMate is a Linux OS (based on Ubuntu-Mate) that runs KStars/Ekos, PHD, INDI, and probably a few things I'm forgetting. The software is pretty amazing.
Of course this is all just the "image acquisition" half of the astrophotography process. There's also the "image processing" part of the workflow, but there are free apps that do that too.
