Hey all. Considering the diverse people we get on the board here, this seemed like a decent place to ask this question. I was wondering if there are any astrophotographers on the board who might have some recommendations for a newbie.

Right now, as I type this, I'm sitting outside my house, with my camera a good 20 feet away on a tripod, pointed up, with the shutter open (been a good 5 minutes so far), taking a picture of the celestial pole, roughly centered between Altair, Vega, Albireo and Gienah. I'm using an old (like, 20 years old) Minolta X-700, with a 50 mm f/2 lens on. I also snapped a couple pics of Mars, both through that lens, and through a 76-205mm zoom.

Um, we just had a helicopter fly overhead - not sure if they entered the field of view or not, though it'd look kinda neat if it did.

Anyway, my budget at the moment is kind of limited. I'm saving up for the down payment on a condo, and to go back to school. Anyway, I'm wondering what other low-budget equipment one might recommend for an amateur getting started with astronomy, or astrophotography. So far, besides my old camera setup I mentioned above, I've picked up the book "Practical Astrophotography", which seems pretty good. To find stars, I downloaded Starry Night Backyard, which seems pretty good software for this.

Well, any advice anyone would have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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Sleep? Isn't that that totally inadaquate substitute for caffeine I've heard so much about?

Quantumfoamy.com, my astronomy/astrophotography blog.

Had that happen to me once. Police helicopter flew through the field of a 30 minute guided exposure of M81 and M82 (in Ursa Major). Got a "flash" photo of the bottom of the copter, illuminated by the running lights.

With the lenses you have, you won't get Mars as anything more than a dot. You need a lot more magnification than that. Even the Moon will be only about a mm accross on film with the 205 mm lens.

You won't be able to get much past star trails and meteors without a scope with an equatorial mount and a clock drive. Equatorial Newtonians start at less than $500. You can use it as a platform for your camera and lenses or as a big lens by using a "T-adaptor" for prime focus photography.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

No, no, no, no, no. What you got was a photo of Planet X.

You're in such denial... #-o


:P

Thirty years ago? Quick, somebody tell Nancy! 8-[

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I know absolutely nothing about photography, celestial or terrestrial, so you probably should ignore this. But....

Don't you mean "taking a picture of the zenith"? The celestial pole is near Polaris.

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- Learn a lot teaching others.

Yeah, my bad. I meant sky's zenith, rather than celestial pole. #-o #-o

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Sleep? Isn't that that totally inadaquate substitute for caffeine I've heard so much about?

Quantumfoamy.com, my astronomy/astrophotography blog.

Some random thought type tips.

Since you are using film: If you can, join Sam's Club (or =) so that you can get cheap film processing. Ask them for a CD only no prints, this is cheaper still. You will have lots (potentially whole rolls) of bad/unusable shots so you don't waste money/paper printing them. Get "Photo Shop" or similar software and make your own prints from the one or two good shots you might get per roll of film.

There are some programs you can download off the web that will allow you to align and stack some of your shots to get one good one from several mediocre ones. Sorry, I can't provide links, maybe somebody else here has them at their finger tips.

Start with the easy, short exposure stuff like the Sun and Moon. These require no clock drive because the exposure times are fast.

The Mead EXT series of telescopes and the Celestron Nexstars are good "kit" scopes that come whith drives and mounts that will let you get a little more sophisticated without a financial bloodbath. I haven't see or worked with the Mead LDX's but they look like they have potential as good photo-scopes.

Hope this helps you.

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It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

Try to get in touch with a local astronomy club, you will get lots of help and advice and also the chance to use other peoples (expensive) equipment!

You might want to make a "barn door" mount. That's just two pieces of wood connected at one edge with a hindge and the opposite end has some form of spreader. Pointing the hindge at Polaris you and then adjust the spreader to roughly track the sky. Don't try to use this for really precesion work.

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I don't ask stupid questions. I just make stupid statements!!!

Yep, I was reading up on the barn door mount in the book Practical Astronomy. Looks pretty promising.

BTW, I've posted links to three pics I took Saturday night here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/sirthoreth/6153.html - obviously, I've got a lot of issues I need to address, like a better scanning system, cutting down on light pollution, etc.

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Sleep? Isn't that that totally inadaquate substitute for caffeine I've heard so much about?

Quantumfoamy.com, my astronomy/astrophotography blog.

Hint: Treat the Moon as you would any sunlit scene. f/8 @ 1/250 makes a nice starting point.

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

... but don't expect stars to show up in the picture

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I've got a question here related to astrophotography:

What is a dark frame and a flat feild? And what do I use it for. Because in Registax, you can make a dark and flat feild out of a video you have taken. Could someone explain?

skyglow1

A dark frame is used to characterize the inherent noise of a detector (typically CCD, but it doesn't have to be). Essentially, it is a picture with the cover on/aperature closed but it will still have some signal due to the heat of the detector and random fluctuations. Usually you subtract the dark frame (or an appropriate average) from the image to get a new image where something that should be black really is black. At least, that is the goal. It never quite works out that way, but it gets close.

A flat field is an image of a uniformly lit source (twilight sky, brightly lit canvas at some given temperature/light wavelength, average of several sky images in different locations, etc.) used to characterize the performance of each pixel of the detector. For just the detector, it is used to eliminate the effect of warm and cool pixels -- pixels that respond too strongly or not strongly enough -- bad pixels and columns and other areas with nonuniform response. For the instrument as a whole, it takes care of unfocused dust, misalignments in the focus plane and vignetting -- the focal center being brighter than the limbs. You would divide your images by this frame to get a new image that should represent a uniformly responding detector with no defects.

Remember to apply the dark field correction to the flat fields: you want everything to work off of the same "zero" value. And, if you have enough time, you should take a dark/flat combination for each image you take, since conditions change over the course of the night. But not everyone has that much time, so one or two during the imaging session usually must suffice.

Hopefully this helps.

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