CHEAP Begginer?

[Maplesyrup]

Ive been to 2 astronomy camps over past two years but only ever looked in a telescope at the last camp. Once I saw Saturn with its moons and the orion nebula I knew I had to get into this. Im abit low on the money side but I would love to take long exposures to get some colour out of the sky. Whats the best way to go about this?
I know i will need a motorised tripod but im unsure what telescope or camera to get. Do newtonians work well with webcams?

My mums camera with a 15sec exposure is abit shoddy and the images end up all grainy so I dont think i could use it.

[kookbreaker]

Ive been to 2 astronomy camps over past two years but only ever looked in a telescope at the last camp. Once I saw Saturn with its moons and the orion nebula I knew I had to get into this. Im abit low on the money side but I would love to take long exposures to get some colour out of the sky. Whats the best way to go about this?
I know i will need a motorised tripod but im unsure what telescope or camera to get. Do newtonians work well with webcams?

My mums camera with a 15sec exposure is abit shoddy and the images end up all grainy so I dont think i could use it.

I will have to say this: Walk before you can run.

Get a telescope and enjoy looking through it before you consider astrophotography. Astrophotography can be a real cash drain, time drain, and very frustrating for folks who are still learning the basics of telescope usage.

To get color shots you will need a lot more than 15 seconds, generally speaking.

For long exposure you need: A good camera, a good telescope tube, a good steel legged mount, possibly software, and time. This can add up.

I dont want to discourage you, just laying it out for you.

[RickJ]

Best cheap way to take nice photos of the night sky is to build a barn door manual drive for a 50mm film camera loaded with ASA 200 Ektachrome. You do need to know how to polar align it but that's true of anything. You can pick up an old manual SLR cheap at a used camera store, stop the lens down a couple stops as cheap lenses aren't all that good wide open. A locking cable release will hold the shutter open on bulb setting. You can get some rather nice color shots of the summer milky way this way.

But the nice photos of the nebula and galaxies you see in the astro photo section of this forum requre anything but cheap gear. For that type work a very good mount is needed, a way to guide it and at least a DSLR camera. Expect $4,000 minumum. Far cheaper is planetary work with a web cam if you already have a lap top computer. There most any 6" or larger scope on a basic clock driven mount will work as exposure times are a tiny fraction of a second and drive errors are immaterial. With the moon you can likely get something usable without a drive if the power and aperture are such that exposure time is say 1/250". Planets though are far dimmer and require higher magnification further dimming them so where you need a drive. Free software like Registax can take the web cam images and sort out the good from the bad resulting in good data. Its then up to you to make the most of that data. It isn't easy getting to the proficiency of the top planetary imagers like Mike Salway (Iceman).

Get a good book on the topic. Covington's "Astrophotography for the Amateur" is one. Find a local club with an astrophotographer. And most importantly, learn the night sky well as only then do you even know where to point it. The learning curve of astrophotography is very steep, too steep if you don't already know scopes and the night sky before you dive in.

Rick

[redshifter]

Follow Kookbreaker's advice above. Start slow, get a good beginner scope and spend time learning about it and the sky. Put off astrophotography aspirations for now.

This is an excellent read and is highly recommended for beginners: http://scopereviews.com/begin.html

Here is an excerpt from that link:
Avoid any thoughts of astrophotography for now. You are going to
have your hands full dealing with the scope itself. Trust me. More astronomers
leave the hobby due to excessive involvement with astrophotography than for
any other reason, save the cheap department store telescopes.

[Maplesyrup]

Yeah I suppose you are alright, and there is no way I can invest $4000 in it at the moment. I will check out that site right after this post! I think the pretty shapes and colours attracted me :)

[Jason_Roberts]

Before even jumping into grabbing a telescope, there are a few things that would be better before making a huge investment with more expensive equipment.

• A plastic planisphere: They make paper ones, too. Unfortunately they only last me about a day, especially when morning dew clings to them. The plastic ones are very durable and a good one will only run a person around $10.00 USD (Not sure what that would equate to in Aus.)

I have grown very attached to my planisphere. They are indispensable.

Be sure to find one that is made for your hemisphere and latitude. You should be fine as long as you are within about 10 degrees of your lat.

• Binoculars: Far more useful and handy than it sounds. You will need these even when you do get a decent telescope when trying to find deep space objects.

You will want something that doesn't have less than a lens of 40mm. The ideal lens for observation would really be something like 50mm, but the 40mm work just fine.

Basically look on the binoculars for something that says 8x40 or better. 8 tells you that it magnifies the image of the lens (which is 40) by 8 times.

Oh yeah, and be careful not to drop them on something hard that will knock them out of alignment.

Once you have become really familiar with the skies and are able to find objects fairly quickly, it could be time to move up to a telescope.

EDIT: Also when you do move up to a telescope, do NOT get one with an equatorial mount right away. It's too much to fool around with at the start of things. (This is only my opinion, of course.)

Once you start getting really entrenched in amateur astronomy and astrophotography, chances are good you will eventually accumulate a fairly good-sized collection of telescopes. Save the big ten-inchers for last.

[blueshift]

There is even a cheaper way to go about things. Join a local astronomy club, one with a lot of members who do a lot of observing. Australia is full of them. The dues in our club is just $20/year for students and $30/year for family members.

From there you just show up at the star parties and follow their rules (no headlights, red-lit flashlights only, etc) and enjoy watching members doing imaging and looking through many other scopes of different types. One in our group does video astronomy so people can look right at his television screen to view images that were stacked in just 15 seconds.
www.nsaclub.org is our site and a typical example of what you might find in your area.

You don't need to empty your wallet when someone else already has.