Adventure in Astrophotography Begins

So, now that I don’t have to get up before dawn every morning and have a little free time on my hands, I feel like it is time to back into astronomy.  My interest was kindled way back when I was 6 or 7 years old and my parents gave me one of those early Tasco telescopes (it was a 60mm refractor with a focal length of 700mm – a great little scope!) and I’ve been hooked ever since.  I still have that Tasco and its .965 lenses and I still pull it out every so often.  But every visual astronomer always gets aperture envy, so my wife was kind enough to get me an 8-inch Celestron back in the mid-90s. But, due to all the trees around the our house and a hectic work schedule, I probably never get the use out of it that I should. And when it came time for us to downsize, it was clear that the Celestron was just not going to make the cut – it took up too much room and it was getting a little bit too heavy for me to lug around and set up. So it was time to sell the Celestron and pick up a small grab-and-go scope that took up as little space as possible. After a fair amount of agony and research, I knew that I was going to get a table-top and I eventually settled on the 4.5 inch (114mm) Starblast from Orion, as a number of reviewers raved about its optics. I was torn about whether to get the 6 inch, which is the de-facto standard for a “real” scope, but I really wanted the tracking mount that comes with the 4.5 inch because I wanted to try my hand at a little astrophotography. 

Back in the ancient history of my youth, astrophotography was an incredibly complex and expensive venture and you really had to know what you were doing.  Imaging with film required special equipment and hours of pinpoint tracking with equatorial mounts, sometimes over multiple nights. This was definitely for the hardcore! But about 10 or 15 years ago, the manufacture of new image sensors allowed for the development of the DSLR and phone camera and that has revolutionized astrophotography. You can still spend in the tens of thousands of dollars on astrophotography if you are really into it, but now you can get more than decent images with your DSLR or even your iPhone using prime focus or afocal methods. And with free “stacking” software, you can even use an alt-azimuth mount with limited exposure times to get some fine pictures.

Now, I know I will not be getting images that match what you see from the Hubble Space Telescope or the fly-bys of Jupiter or Saturn.  But I wanted to see what I could do without spending an excessive amount of money.  With the short focal length of the Starblast and the pretty light weight limit of the tracking mount, I was a little concerned about the results I might get attempting the prime focus method with my DSLR.  And after looking at what Andrew Symes and Mike Weasner had been able to do using the afocal method with their iPhone, I decided that was the way to go.

So here is the equipment I ended up with for a total cost of under 500 dollars:

• Orion Starblast 114mm with AutoTracker Mount and Beginner Barlow (2x) Kit with 10mm and 25MM eypieces
• Orion SteadyPix Universal Smartphone Telescope Photo Mount
• 1.25″ Orion Variable Polarizing Filter
• Orion Tri-Mag 1.25″ 3x Barlow Lens

In addition, I already owned two Celestron eyepiecs that I did not sell – a 7.25mm and a 6.5-18MM Zoom. All this equipment should allow me to be able to get decent views of the planets as well as the brighter Deep Sky Objects, both visually and (hopefully) photographically.

This will truly be astrophotography on the cheap! So, I hope you will follow me on this little adventure and perhaps we can learn a thing or two along the way. I will be posting my various attempts and failures as they occur in the near future.