Why a good tripod is so important?
On many astrophotography and astronomy forums I notice that there are some beginners who would like to buy a new telescope and start with an astrophotography. They buy a reasonably good telescope, a mount for tracking, a camera but at the end there is no more money for a good tripod.
Tripod or pier is just one of the most basic parts of every astrophotography equipment. It’s just the base of our system. As I mentioned many people forget about it when they are buying a new scope and without it the whole equipment is unusable because it’s shaking and that’s very annoying at visual observation but impossible for astrophotography.
In general there are two options how to ground out setup:
- Tripod
Aluminium tripod from Vixen
It’s the most common holder of our astrophotography equipment. Tripod sometimes comes together with the mount or the whole telescope but these tripods are not good every time. It may happen that we are going to attach more heavy equipment to our telescope (eyepieces, guidescope, camera) which causes that the default tripod is not enough strong anymore. In this case we have to change out tripod with the new one.A lot of manufactures produce tripods nowadays. We have to be careful when we are buying a new one, because they are not all the same. We have to know for what we are going to use it – astrophotography or visual astronnomy observations. If we are planning to use it for astrophotography then a tripod should have 20-30% more weight capacity then we are going to put on – just for any case! That’s because in astrophotography (expecially in deep-sky imaging) long-lasting exposures are necessary and every single shake during the min lasting exposure makes it crap. So think twice when you will be in doubts to save some money!
The last but not the least thing to mention here is that wooden tripods are usualy better because wood reduces all the minimum shakes that occurs when we are walking around the telescope. And naturally, they are also more expensive! - Pier
That’s the second option we have. We use piers mostly in observatories. They are better because they are cheper variant but on the other hand we cannot just pick them up and go to the holidays. Another advantage is that they are fixed on the same position all the time and when we make accurate polar alignment of our mount there is no need to realign it every time we start the observation or astrophotography.
So, that’s all about our base of the whole system for astrophotography. I hope that you found this article interesting and useful.
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Interesting stuff. What kind of tripod would you recommend, I mean can you give a few examples? I’m using a heavy duty one but the lens on my DSLR is so heavy that even the heavy tripod can’t control the weight properly. Needless to say the tripod was the cheaper option!