Expert Astrophotography Tips & Discussions | Share Your Photos!

[Some Slacker]

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/bb223/SomeSlacker/NearFull1.jpg

This was two nights work just fiddling around, I have no kind of equipment to actually do any real astrophotography but I gave it a shot.

Taken with a Bushnell Dob 8" using afocal coupling and a cheap digital camera (real cheap) and an 18 mm lens.

 

[sas3]

I Shot this with my Coulter Odyssey 1 and a cheap Garmin GPS (has a built in camera like a cellphone) held up to the eyepiece

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69555355@N07/7112650509/

 

[Some Slacker]

I Shot this with my Coulter Odyssey 1 and a cheap Garmin GPS (has a built in camera like a cellphone) held up to the eyepiece

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69555355@N07/7112650509/

Nice! I like it!

I see we had the same problem with way too much light as the details (except near the edges) got a bit washed out. (Putting the camera up to the lens = afocal coupling, or something... heh)

 

[sas3]

I used an off-axis aperture stop as seen below
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1119/569393765_4d4c8a2f41.jpg (Not my picture)

That helps a lot, without it the moon hurts your eyes.

 

[Bikersquirrel]

Hi noob here :) I only recently managed to really get into astrophotography (kids often dictate otherwise i.e no time!), and decided to test run my shiny new camera on the super moon. I did manage to get a few reasonably good shots, but they were all a bit too dark. I looked.up some advice on the best settings to use on my camera, and was recommended to switch the ISO to 100. I tried again the next night but just couldn't get the exposure right. Any suggestions? I'm using a fuji HS20 EXR bridge camera. Thanks in advance!

 

[Drakkith]

Bikersquirrel, I don't shoot with a normal camera so I can't really help you much on the settings, but if you head over to cloudynights.com and hit up the DSLR forum or beginning and intermediate astrophotography forum there should be plenty of people who can help you.

 

[sas3]

Venus transit photos.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69555355@N07/7158053251/http://www.flickr.com/photos/69555355@N07/7158054785//

 

[sas3]

And one more Venus Sun Transit.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69555355@N07/7158344253/

 

[Drakkith]

Excellent shot of the transit of Venus Sas3!

 

[sas3]

Thanks I just through something together to take some pictures since this will not happen again for 105 years and I wouldn't have another chance to see it. I did have several people stop to see what I was doing and had one person try to look into the wrong end of the telescope, just love when that happens...LOL

 

[sas3]

Hi noob here :) I only recently managed to really get into astrophotography (kids often dictate otherwise i.e no time!), and decided to test run my shiny new camera on the super moon. I did manage to get a few reasonably good shots, but they were all a bit too dark. I looked.up some advice on the best settings to use on my camera, and was recommended to switch the ISO to 100. I tried again the next night but just couldn't get the exposure right. Any suggestions? I'm using a fuji HS20 EXR bridge camera. Thanks in advance!

Put it into manual mode and just play with different ISO, aperture, and shutter speed settings until you get the right one, that is the nice thing about digital cameras no film to waste.
I have a GE 14 Megapixel camera similar to yours however with mine I do not have a way to set it to manual focus, (don't know if you have the same settings) so it is almost useless to use through my telescope. Manual mode on my camera let's me set the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, but no dam manual focus...

 

[Tigerbarb1]

Only an amateur photographer and astronomer here, yet I love combining the 2 professions! Will post photos later... stay tuned...

 

[LadyStardust]

I just bought a Nikon D5100. I have an 18-55, 55-200 and a NIKKOR AF-S 50mm f/1.8 Lens. What else do I need? Can anyone give me any advice? I've only practiced at our local observatory but that was much easier. I'd like to do some astrophotography without the use of a telescope. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Drakkith]

I just bought a Nikon D5100. I have an 18-55, 55-200 and a NIKKOR AF-S 50mm f/1.8 Lens. What else do I need? Can anyone give me any advice? I've only practiced at our local observatory but that was much easier. I'd like to do some astrophotography without the use of a telescope. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'd say you need something to mount the camera on. If you plan on doing any exposures longer than about a second or so you need a mount that tracks the sky. Luckily your camera has a relatively low amount of magnification so the accuracy of the mount does not need to be as good as what a telescope generally needs. If you're interested in astrophotography then I would suggest heading over to www.cloudynights.com and going to the forums there. That is pretty much the goto place for the hobby.

 

[LadyStardust]

I'd say you need something to mount the camera on. If you plan on doing any exposures longer than about a second or so you need a mount that tracks the sky. Luckily your camera has a relatively low amount of magnification so the accuracy of the mount does not need to be as good as what a telescope generally needs. If you're interested in astrophotography then I would suggest heading over to www.cloudynights.com and going to the forums there. That is pretty much the goto place for the hobby.

Sounds good...for when I have the time. I can barely get a breather with my studies, job AND internship right now :/ I always wanted to try it but browsing endless forums ... well, let's just say I went ADD after 5 seconds. I did figure I'd need a different mount. Which I can't even afford right now.

In the meantime, are there any particular settings I should consider?

 

[Drakkith]

Sounds good...for when I have the time. I can barely get a breather with my studies, job AND internship right now :/ I always wanted to try it but browsing endless forums ... well, let's just say I went ADD after 5 seconds. I did figure I'd need a different mount. Which I can't even afford right now.

In the meantime, are there any particular settings I should consider?

That depends entirely on what you are doing with the camera. And as I don't have a normal camera I don't think I can help you in this area.

 

[chemisttree]

Best one I've seen yet. Of course I didn't take it...

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/1963/bestannulareclipsephoto.jpg

 

[chemisttree]

I just bought a Nikon D5100. I have an 18-55, 55-200 and a NIKKOR AF-S 50mm f/1.8 Lens. What else do I need? Can anyone give me any advice? I've only practiced at our local observatory but that was much easier. I'd like to do some astrophotography without the use of a telescope. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'd use the f1.8 lens. Set your ISO setting to 6400 and everything else to manual. Manual focus to infinity, ISO6400, lowest f-number possible and exposure time to 30 sec. Any longer on the exposure time and you will get trailing stars. Aim toward the southern sky at around 11:00 pm at a dark site. You won't see as much near a big city. Do this when there is no moon.

Good luck!

 

[Chronos]

I believe most DSLR's are optimized at ISO 400 for long exposures. Assuming that is still true, you should get your best pictures with that setting.

 

[Topher925]

I believe most DSLR's are optimized at ISO 400 for long exposures. Assuming that is still true, you should get your best pictures with that setting.

I don't think they are really "optimized" for it, they just happen to perform well around that much gain due to the nature of CMOS sensors. There's a lot of controversy around noise injection vs exposure time when it comes to low and high ISO settings. I've always had to use high ISO settings (1600,3200,6400 when its cold out) due to the limitations of my mount/camera but I just got a new mount last week and will soon be testing this theory.

 

[Topher925]

Finally got some spare time and clear skies a couple nights ago and got to try out my new mount for the first time. I had a lot of technical issues early on in the night but managed to get 15 x 1min exposures of M101. Haven't really had the time to fully process it though.

 

[Drakkith]

Not bad for 15 minutes! Get that exposure time into the hour+ mark to really start seeing some detail.

 

[chemisttree]

Nice round stars! What camera did you use?

 

[davenn]

Nice round stars! What camera did you use?

further to that... what was the telescope, telephoto lens ? prime focus setup ? etc etc

Dave

 

[sas3]

Just thought I would share a picture of my telescope

GEDC1879 by Scottsas3

 

[Topher925]

further to that... what was the telescope, telephoto lens ? prime focus setup ? etc etc

Dave

I use a Pentax K-5 (*gasp* not a Canon, I know). The scope was an Orion ST-80 which is in pretty bad shape but it works surprisingly well for a $100 scope. Mount was a CG-5gt which I quickly setup using a polar scope and two star alignment. If I did a four star alignment and sighted things up a bit I probably could have easily gotten up to three minute exposures I would think.

 

[Topher925]

Well I got my a new (to me) scope last week and first lighted it last night. I was floored with the higher quality optics. The moon was amazing and in stunning detail. Stars are sharper, colors better, and practically no false color visually.

Pictures come out a lot nicer too. I shot M101 again (among others) to see how it compared to my last scope.

 

[chemisttree]

If I did a four star alignment and sighted things up a bit I probably could have easily gotten up to three minute exposures I would think.

Using more reference stars only helps with the GOTO functionality of the mount. The tracking accuracy is solely due to polar alignment and cannot be corrected with any alignment methodology except perhaps the polar alignment function on the CG5-ASGT mount. You can autoguide with the CG5-ASGT via the 'Guide' port if you want to use longer exposures or do a very precise drift alignment.

Nice pic of M101 using the new scope. Is it an apo or a reflector?

 

[Topher925]

Using more reference stars only helps with the GOTO functionality of the mount. The tracking accuracy is solely due to polar alignment and cannot be corrected with any alignment methodology except perhaps the polar alignment function on the CG5-ASGT mount. You can autoguide with the CG5-ASGT via the 'Guide' port if you want to use longer exposures or do a very precise drift alignment.

Nice pic of M101 using the new scope. Is it an apo or a reflector?

Whoops, what I meant to say was using an ALL-star alignment, not four star. Although lately I've found the polar scope does a better job with polar alignment than the all-star alignment. I've been thinking about guiding but probably won't do that for a while as I'm still progressing up the learning curve.

The scope is an Orion ED80, so its one of those fake APO's. I've got a focal reducer on the way for it. Here's a shot I took of M31 last week with an Astro Tech AT72ED w/FF:

I think I went a little heavy on the high pass filter. I've been learning photoshop CS6 with this image data.

 

[davenn]

This week the population of the far north Queensland city of Cairns, NE Australia, had a boost of some 60,000 or so in its numbers. People from all over Australia and from worldwide converged on the region to catch a glimpse of the 2 minutes of totality that was on offer.
My wife and I did a 3 hour flight from Sydney, Australia, others did 10 hrs in a plane from Perht city on the Australian west coast. This was still nothing compared to those that traveled from the far corners of the earth. From our beach site we were surrounded by people from as close as 5 minutes down the road to those from England, France, Denmark and many other places

it was not looking good at sunrise, with only a thin gap of sky between the horizon and the base of some thick clouds that extended up to ~25 deg elevtion

~10 minutes before totality, the bulk of the cloud finally moved off and we were treated to sun looking decidely smaller

Dave

 

[davenn]

Totality was heralded by the Diamond ring effect and the solar filters came off the scopes and cameras

Totality was spectactular and from our location we had 2mins and 2 sec of "lights out"

and before you knew it it was all over and the moon was moving off the sun

Pentax, K5 DSLR; 500mm telephoto witha 2 x teleconverter (1000mm total f/l) f12.6,
iso 3200, exp 125th sec for diamond ring and totality.
ISO 400 and exp 80th sec for solar filtered pics before and after totality

Now if if I manage to aviod "kicking the bucket" in the 16 years, there is another total eclipse that passes right over home in Sydney (Australia) ~2028 - 2029

cheers
Dave

 

[Drakkith]

Very nice Dave!

 

[davenn]

thanks mate :)

that was my 3rd total eclipse and my second one in Australia

my first total eclipse was 30 something yrs ago back in New Zealand

cheers
Dave

 

[Drakkith]

I have yet to see a total solar eclipse, and only saw my first partial this past summer right at sundown.

 

[Borek]

We have seen the total eclipse of 1999 over the lake Balaton in Hungary (I planned the vacation in such a way we got there on our way back home from the Croatia/Venice). From what I remember no next total eclipse in my lifetime in Europe.