Astronomy and DSLR Astrophotography Blog

The last week I am very active, especially at night. From Thursday I already had 5 all-nighters, capturing M 31, B 334, IC 1396, NGC 7293, … and of course, the Meteors. I figured out that my backyard is just too light polluted, so now I am going capturing to the hill near me, Bohor. In the night from 24th to 25th August I made a timeplase of the night sky with me in the foreground, capturing DSOs. Unfortunately I have caught a meteor sporadic -5 magitude. The picture is so awsome, that I must share with you.

Bolid -5 mag. above me, capturing the night sky

And here is the timelapse of the entire night. I have tagged the meteor:

I admit, I am lazy and that’s why I don’t finish up my Astrophotography Tutorial. I hope that I will find more inspiration, time and will to finish it up in September, because in October I start studying Physics at Ljubljana…

The images of the objects I listed above will be published here soon. As soons as I process them

CS!

astrophotography, personal astronomy, astrophotography, images, landscape, meteors, stars

The night from 12th to 13th August turned to be a little bit better than one before. The Moon was rising later and shining less. I had more luck as well. I caught at least 6 Perseids, I am attaching the most spectacular. The brightest object  right of the meteor is Jupiter:

Perseid on 13th August 2009

I am going to observe tonight again if the weather is OK. We had some clouds yesterday after the midnight. I came home at 8.10 in the morning and I haven’t slept yet, that’s why this post is so short

personal astronomy, meteor shower, meteors, stars

I am not only deep-sky astrophotographer. Every year I take part of the biggest youth astronomy camp in Slovenia – MART. I never take telescope there, because it’s too large and I prefer observing meteors during the camp. Usually the camp lasts during the maximum of Perseids, but this year there’s a moon and it was lasting from 24th July to 2th August 2009.

Yesterday some of my friends from MART came to go to observe the Perseids. We planned to go to Bohor, which is a hill just 20 min drive from my house, but when we came to the place it overcasted. We checked the satellite images and decided to go South-West. It was a good decision. After 1-hour drive we found pretty good place to observe and started observing about at midnight. We had 6 DSLRs, capturing the Perseids as well. I haven’t got any really nice and bright meteor, like my friend did, but I ended with a timelapse of the night.

I came back to home at 6.30 and went to bed at 7.00. But today there will be another night with less moon and more Perseids. If you have an opportunity, take a walk tonight  and look up to the sky. I’m sure you will see one. My the best captured yesterday:

Perseid

personal astronomy, landscape, meteor shower, meteors, moon, stars, trails

The very first thing we have to do when we start an astophotography is to choose the object. We have to know what are benefits of our equipment, what we are planning to capture, what is FOV (field of view) of our telescope and camera, how “deep” our system goes and so on. Let’s take a look at some of this questions.

When we are deciding which object we will be capturing we can help ourselves with different astronomy software. They display imaginary sky and we can take a walk into nigh sky, choosing the objects, checking the rising, setting, magnitude, distance, … All this parameters are important when we are selecting the target for astrophotography.

There is a lot of different programs available on the web for astronomy. Some are free and others are paid. There are some of them:

• Starry Night
• Hallo Northern Sky
• Cartes du Ciel
• SkyMap
• Stellarium

In this tutorial I will be using Starry Night. It is paid but it offers endless of useful options like FOV and has  really a huge database of objects.

First of all we have to know what type of object is appropriate for our astrophotography setup. The predispositions for deep-sky astrophotography are:

• Telescope of telephoto lens
• Mount for tracking that tracks very accurate (under 2″ of error) or has option of auto-guiding
• DSLR or CCS camera with remote control of exposition

In Starry Night we put the parameters in the the section Equipment:

Then we select FOV of our telescope and camera. The program displays us the rectangle that out astrophotography setup “sees”.

So, what’s next? We have to choose the target that we are going to capture. Here are some basic directives:

• Make sure that object is in the field of view at least 3 hours in the total darkness. It has to be at least 15-20° above the horizon all the time of the capturing. Make sure that you have specified your date/time and location accurately!
• Make sure that object roughly fits to the field of your telescope’s view. The rectangle that we have specified before helps us at this step. Make sure that it is not too small – it doesn’t make any sense if you are photographing a very small planetary nebula at 600mm of focal length.
• Make sure that it is not too dim. Almost all the objects from Messier catalogue are OK, and all the bright objects from NGC makes good target as well. If the object is dimmer than 10th magnitude then bigger telescope then 8″ is recommended.
• If you don’t have GoTo or it’s unreliable then make sure that you are able to find the object in the night sky. Help yourself with bright stars, print the carts out.
• If you are using german equatorial mount then make sure that object doesn’t pass the meridian during the planned time of capturing.

Some good objects to start with: M45 (Pleiades), M42 (Orion Nebula), M44 (Beehive Cluster), M27 (Dumbbell Nebula), NGC7000 (North American Nebula), M31 (Andromeda). They are all bright and easy to find even with binoculars.

And here we are. We have the object.

Next time we will take a look at the conditions in the athmosphere that affects to the astrophotography – the weather, seeing, transparency and more.

astrophotography astronomy, astrophotography, camera, deep-sky, equipment, guide, mount, telescope, tutorial

I have decided to publish step-by-step how-to tutorial for astrophotography beginners. It’s International Year of Astronomy and I am pretty sure that there is a lot of people who are interested in astronomy and astrophotography, but they don’t know where to start.

Weekly I will publish articles guiding you trough the process of astrophotography – from equipment to the imaging tips and processing of images on the computer. Each article will cover specific part and every single of them is important for good results.

There are several different types of objects up there and they require different type of equipment, capturing, processing. In this tutorial I will focus on deep-sky astrophotography with DSLR camera and with amateur equipment in range up to 5.000$. If you are beginner – don’t be afraid! There is a possibility to start astrophotography with much lower budget and get stunning results. You just need to be patient and don’t give up.

Contents:

• Part I: Choosing an Object
• Part II: Camera Settings
• Part III: The Telescope

Don’t forget that we all learn from mistakes. With patience and enthusiasm everything is possible. Enjoy the Universe and Clear Skies!

NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula @ Primož Cigler

astrophotography astronomy, astrophotography, deep-sky, equipment, guide, images, milky way, nebula, stars, tutorial

The following, also very popular mount, is fork equatorial mount. As the name tells us it is one version of equatorial mounts which means that one of two axis is parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation. In this way we avoid slewing at the both axis at the same time when capturing the astrophotos and simplicity almost always means less errors.

We find fork equatorial mounts mostly in observatories since they are more often made for bigger telescopes and not-portable. The exception here are two the biggest manufactures of astronomy equipment: Celestron and Meade. Meade’s the most popular telescope – LX200 – has this type of mount. Nevertheless, the most common use of fork equatorial mount is in smaller to mid-size observatories – mostly professional.

The fork equatorial mount exists in rough from two parts: the base and a fork. Fork is attached to the base and enables moving from East to West (R. A. axis) whereas telescope is attached in the middle of the fork and allows us to navigate from North to South (Declination axis). The main advantage of the fork equatorial mount is that it doesn’t require meridian flip – that problem occurs at german equatorial mount when is passes the meridian and has to go 360° around or it stops slewing.

To conclude, fork equatorial mounts are mostly used in the observatories, they costs much and are heavy, accurate and not-portable.

I have worked several times with fork eq. mount but I don’t like it at all! I have german equatorial at my home and it suits me the best! For everyone who needs portable and reliable mount I advise german equatorial.

Thanks for reading!

Image source: Wikipedia.org

equipment astronomy, astrophotography, earth, equatorial, equipment, fork, mount, tripod

Canon’s low-priced range of Digital Single Lens Reflexive (DSLR) cameras are extremely popular between amateur astrophotographers. In this group we can find the following cameras as they appeared on the market:

• Canon Rebel (300D)
• Canon Rebel XT (350D)
• Canon Rebel XTi (400D)
• Canon Rebel XSi (450D)

The first Canon Rebel was published in 2003 and since then the astrophotography began also more popular and reachable to everyone.
There is a lot of reasons why Rebels are so popular. I’ll try to emphasise the most important:

1. PRICE
   Until the announcement of Canon Rebel there were no other cameras for the reasonably good price delivering all the specifications that are needed for astrophotography. There were only a few astronomy CCD cameras available for high prices. With the Rebel everything changed. It has all the main features needed for astrophotography and it is providing excellent picture quality for low amount of money.
2. SENSOR SIZE
   The Rebels’ sensors are the APS-C size (22.7 x 15.1mm) witch works pretty well for astrophotography because it covers a large area on the sky with any optical instrument.
3. PREVIEW ON LCD
   We are always able to check the focus, the object, field of view etc. on the LCD. It’s one of the most useful things and here DSLRs beats even much more expensive CCD cameras.
4. HIGH SENSITIVITY
   The ISO setting ranges from ISO100 to ISO1600 and more. The picture quality is still OK at high ISO settings and with combining we can get practically noiseless images.
5. PICTURE QUALITY
   Picture quality is just outstanding for this price. At high ISO setting and long exposures the pictures are still useful.
6. DAYLIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
   The camera you use for astrophotography can still be used for daylight photography unless you modified it. That saves you a lot of money since you don’t need two cameras – one for astrophotography and another for daylight photography.
7. DIGITAL FORMAT
   It’s quite obvious that images from digital camera are in digital format, isn’t is ? Digital pictures are much more fond for post-processing then scanned film.
8. MODIFICATION
   With modifications we can get out even more from Rebels – if we remove the filter in front of the CMOS sensor the camera becomes much more sensitive for H-α part of spectrum and we are able to get more information with shorter exposures.
9. VIEWFINDER
   Viewfinder is extremely handy when we are positioning the camera to deep-sky object. It saves us a lot of time. With the CCDs we are forced to take multiple exposures just to specify the right location and angle of the camera and that’s really time-consuming.
10. CONNECTIVITY WITH PC
    All the Rebels can be remotely controlled with a PC. They comes with the most basic software but on the web you can find a software that turns your Canon Rebel to the fully remote camera!

Of course, there are not only advantages of DSLRs. They have many cons and their quality is not on the same level as CCDs but with some skills we can turn them for really good astrocameras.

Thanks for reading!

astrophotography, equipment 300D, astronomy, astrophotography, camera, canon, digital, equipment, rebel

The light pollution is becoming more and more annoying thing more or less all over the world. Astronomers are the ones who suffers due to that more than any others. The problem is that there are every year less locations for observing and photographing the untouched sky. Well, some manufactures of astronomy equipment decided to produce filters that suppress the light pollution.

On the beginning of summer 2008 I figured out that the situation from the point of light pollution from my backyard is so bad that I need the solution. On the web I found some filters that suppress the light pollution but no one good review of them.

In the end I decided for IDAS LPS filter of Hutec. Because I was pretty sure I will be using just for astrophotography I decided for front-filter (look at this figure) which can be placed directly in the camera’s body so I can use it with lenses also and not just with the telescope. The version of filter is P2, that means that is the most suitable for astrophotography in prime focus.

The filter arrived on June and costed approximately 250 eur here in Europe, in USA it’s a bit cheaper. The first impression was something like: “250 eur for such a piece of glass?!??”. But after a first-light I changed my opinion. It is worth every single pennie! It works just the best for me, my backyard turned to the very good astrophotography place. It has no affect to sharpness of the image. I use it with my Canon 350D (Baader mod.) and also both sample pictures are captured with this equipment. The telescope was William Optics SuperAPO 80/480 with TeleVue reducer/flattener 0.8x. The picture without filter is out of focus because when I removed the filter I didn’t refocused. Anyway, it represents the affect of filter. Both pictures are captured at the same settings: f/4.8, ISO1600, 120s, RAW, WB(2850, -30), imported and exported with Lightroom.

The image without Hutech IDAS LPS filter

The image with Hutech IDAS LPS filter

It’s quite obvius what the filter does.

I have also measured the Mean of these two pictures. The median value for the picture without IDAS LPS is 118 whereas the median for picture with IDAS LPS filter is 52.

That’s all, hope that this article will help someone to decide what to buy or not to buy.

equipment, reviews astronomy, astrophotography, camera, canon, digital, equipment, filter, hutech, idas, images, light pollution, review

In this post we will take a look at one of the most important equipment for astrophotography – that’s camera.

Only 10 years ago we’d found astrophotography as pretty expensive. The reason is that the cameras for serious work costed a fortune! Anyway, it was Canon 300D which completely changed everything in 2003. Now it’s only 6 years from that and we all are using DSLRs for astrophotography. Let’s take a look at it:

Canon 300D was the first very good DSLR. It’s price wasn’t too high and the picture quality was great comparing to other cameras. Firstly became very popular for daylight photography but very soon some astrophotographers figured out that it’s possible to get very nice picture with it. The main advantages are that we can set the high ISO level without suffering too much noise, we can always check the focus on LCD screen, we get digital images which we can post-processed with the computer and many more.

But that wasn’t enough for some of astrophotographers. If we take long exposures (above 1 min) that means that the sensor is on all the time and the temperature increase. And when the temperature increase the noise becomes annoying on pictures. This problem can be solved with cooling and some astrophotographers started to modify their Rebels to improve the image quality.

It’s not only the temperature which makes 300D worse that it could be. There is also a filter in front of the CMOS sensor which blocks almost all the light in H-α part of spectrum. That’s the problem because almost all the nebulas in the space consists of this element and when we are capturing we loose almost all the light we want. It’s like looking at Andromeda’s galaxy with sunglasses.
This problem can be solved also. All we have to do is to remove the filter in front of CMOS and replace it with some other or clear-glass. The only way to do this is to disassembly our camera or let someone do that.
For example, the Hutech is the company that produces replacement filters, they can replace filter instead of you, and what is more, you can buy the modified camera at them.
However, Teleskop-Service offers the same in Europe.

On the end I’m presenting you one picture that was captured with “the king of DSLRs in astrophotography”, Canon Rebel/300D/Kiss.
It’s picture of Veil nebula which is located in Cygnus. The exposure was 12 times 5 minutes post-processed in Photoshop and Iris. The telescope was Takahashi FSQ-106 and mount Celestron CGE. I’m sure you like it!

Veil Nebula @ Marjan Žagar & Primož Cigler

astrophotography, equipment 300D, astronomy, astrophotography, canon, equipment, images, milky way, rebel, veil

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.

astrophotography, equipment astronomy, astrophotography, equipment, tripod