Michael‘s Astrophoto Blog

Starting with astrophotography was quite a steep learning curve for me. Though I felt that I had a reasonably good grasp of many of the general concepts - the reality of making all components work well together was something different. At the beginning large portions of the observing nights were spent battling all kinds of technical issues with the new equipment.  In this post I want to describe some of the bigger or smaller issues and pitfalls I encountered. Many of them may be specific to my situation and equipment, but perhaps it gives some idea on what to look out for. Don’t trust Indi device defaults The Indi drivers for most devices come with a large number of device settings. As a beginner I was not always clear on what each of them does and/or why I may want something different. My assumption was that the default settings are good enough to get started and changes can be left for fine tuning at a much later point in time. However, when taking and processing the first pictur...

As I described in the previous blog my equipment has improved quite a bit over the past weeks. I got a dedicated, cooled astro camera as well as a separate camera and a little finder scope for automatic guiding. After sorting out the initial technical issues, finally we had    a few clear nights to put the new kit to the test.  M33 30x30sec, C9.25 with 1/6.3 reducer, ASI294MC Pro on NexStar Evolution  M1 Crab Nebula, 28x60sec C9.25 with 1/6.3 reducer, ASI294MC Pro on NexStar Evolution  M27 Dumbbell Nebula, 30x30sec C9.25 with 1/6.3 reducer, ASI294MC Pro on NexStar Evolution  IC5146 Cocoon Nebula, 60x60 sec  C9.25 with 1/6.3 reducer, ASI294MC Pro on NexStar Evolution  NGC6888 Crescent Nebula, 30x30sec C9.25 with 1/6.3 reducer, ASI294MC Pro on NexStar Evolution  As visible in the pictures on close inspection I am still struggling with the autofocus.    The guiding doesn’t work really flawlessly in all cases, particularly in high ...

After the first promising tests I could have continued with the initial equipment setup for a while. However, I had the impression that I am enjoying astrophotography enough to move to a more "final"setup as quickly as possible. I was expecting that a dedicated, cooled astro camera, an auto-guiding setup and a new mount will probably be required. On the other hand I wanted to take this journey in steps so that I didn’t have to deal with too many new things at the same time. So I took the decision to go with the cameras first. That way I would have everything ready to go to test the guiding accuracy of a new mount later. Selecting an astro-camera At first the vast number of different astro-cameras that are being offered is a bit overwhelming. I tried to get some structure in the decision process, while not overthinking it. Here is how I went about the selection: Vendor choice : The first thing I noticed was that a large number of camera variants is basically the same sensor be...