The Journey begins

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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 if it works in general and if I would enjoy it.


Getting started with the equipment 


For several years I have owned a Celestron 9.25“ Schmidt Cassegrain on a NexStar Evolution azimuthal mount. Luckily, from a different scope I already owned a wedge to turn this into an equatorial mount. That should be at least as good as a basic travel mount. 

What was missing was a camera. I did not want to spend a lot on a new DSLR plus possibly a modification for astrophotography as this was just to try it out and I may want to change to a dedicated astro camera later. Fortunately there is quite an extensive second hand market for DSLRs, including  ones that are already modified. So I was able to get a used, modified Canon EOS 600D together with some (not very good) lenses. All this needed to be accompanied with various adapters to mount the camera in parallel and behind the scope as well as a power supply and a remote control for the camera. 

Used Canon EOS600D with astro modification,
200mm zoom lens and remote control.
The camera has a dummy battery that allows to power it via USB



The other thing I added right away was a motor focuser for the Celestron. I had been contemplating getting one just for visual observation. However, I felt that it would make my life so much easier being able to reproducibly move between the focus point of the various configurations. 

First Results 

I started with taking pictures with the camera mounted parallel to the cope and using a tele lens. However, I quickly went on to image through the telescope. It was an amazing experience to see the first color picture form on the Canon display when imaging through the C9.25. The dumbbell nebula is a quite beautiful object visually, however getting the colors as well is really adding to the experience.

The pictures were processed with the free software Siril that provides the basic processing and stacking of the raw images as well as some basic editing features including a photometric color correction. 




M27, Dumbbell Nebula 
5x60sec, Canon EOS600D, C9.25 on NexStar Evolution

M57, Ring Nebula
18x60sec, Canon EOS600D, C9.25 on NexStar Evolution



I find the first results quite promising. They are certainly not "poster quality", but they are pretty convincing "proof of concept" images. And the best part is that making these pictures brought a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction. So I decided to continue on this journey. 





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