Michael‘s Astrophoto Blog

One of the things that made me reluctant to seriously start with astrophotography was the prospect of spending long nights outside in front of a laptop that is tied to the telescope with a long USB cable. Nights that would typically end in disappointment and anger after I inadvertently tripped over that cable - at least that had been my experience in some early attempts.   This time I wanted to take a different approach. The entire setup should be controlled by a little computer that is directly attached to the equipment, while the control would happen remotely over the network.  I guess there are three main technical approaches that you can take to achieve this: mini-pc being controlled over remote desktop; basically using ascom and a similar imaging software as you would use in the "long USB" scenario.  "out of the box" solution from an astronomy equipment vendor like the ASIair Linux based solution using Kstars/Ekos/Indi running e.g. on a Rasperry Pi I am not sur...

At the summer barbecue of our local astronomy club I had a discussion about the prerequisites of picking up astrophotography an additional flavor of my astronomy hobby. I had been shying away from that for many years as I felt that it requires quite an investment in learning, equipment and time. I still believe that to be the case, more or less. However, the guys at the club convinced me that it doesn’t take a lot to get startet and to have some satisfying results.  M31, Andromeda Galaxy 10x90sec, Canon EOS600D, Tamron 200mm Zoom 1/6.3  mounted parallel on NexStar Evolution  There are many introductory texts out there that describe how to start the astrophotography hobby using a simple travel mount and a camera. This approach is probably the best one for a beginner. However, somehow it didn’t match my interests and existing equipment. So I decided to leverage my existing mount and telescope as much as possible. I wanted to add only a few things to get started and to see i...