America's Best Selection of Astrophotography Gear
Astrophotography takes many forms, but it's fundamentally taking pictures of the night sky. It can be as simple as grabbing a quick shot with a cell phone and as advanced as you'd like it to be. Trying to get a start can be a little intimidating, but we're here to help.
Start With What You Have
Astrophotography has never been easier to start. The choice of telescopes, astrographs, mounts, cameras, filters, and other equipment is incredible, and there are amazing online resources for learning.
Modern phone are capable of providing impressive results when used on a tripod in low-light mode for long exposures of scenes at night. Even older phones have cameras good enough to capture impressive images of the Moon when clamped to the eyepiece of a telescope.
If you have an older DSLR camera or a newer mirrorless camera, plus a kit zoom lens, use it on a sturdy tripod to shoot short exposures (under 30 seconds) of night scenes lit by moonlight.
Better Astrophotography
There is a wide variety of highly specialized astrophotography equipment including computerized tracking mounts, dedicated astrophotography cameras, specialized astrographs, and accessories and mini-computers to simplify and largely automate your imaging.
That said, we like to follow the advice given by Dickinson and Dyer in their book The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide. We strongly suggest getting into astrophotography one step at a time. We have a great series of articles on beginning here.
We typically think of astrophotography in four large categories.
Digiscoping Astrophotography
This is using a digital camera and a telescope to take pictures through the eyepiece of the telescope. The most basic version of this is to hold a cell phone up to the eyepiece and to take a quick snapshot. With a good quality cell phone adapter, you can get some excellent images of the moon, sometimes more with practice.
Widefield Astrophotography
Widefield astrophotography is a great way to get beautiful sweeping images of the milky way. These are often time-lapse images to bring out more colour and detail in the night sky. This is easy to do with an existing DSLR or cell phone using a star tracker. As star tracker will slowly move your camera so that it stays aligned with the night sky as the earth slowly rotates.
Planetary Astrophotography
Planetary astrophotography uses a collection of short exposures stacked together to bring out incredible detail in the moon and planets. This technique is called lucky imaging because you're compiling frames taken when you're 'lucky' enough to have stable atmosphere. You can do this with most telescopes and a dedicated planetary camera. We usually think of solar astrophotography as a subset of this branch.
Deep Sky Astrophotography
Deep Sky Astrophotography is arguably the most technically demanding branch of the hobby. You use well calibrated equatorial mounts and dedicated deep sky cameras to take multiple long exposure shots of faint objects like distant galaxies and nebulae. You can use colour cameras, or monochrome cameras and narrowband filters to achieve incredible results.
We're Happy to Help You Get Off to a Good Start
We're also available to help if you have astrophotography questions (we're sure you will). At All Star Telescope we love helping people find the right equipment to get the most out of their time under the stars. Don't hesitate to reach out for expert astrophotography advice and recommendations.
