Astrophotography Gear!
Got a few questions about the gear I used for last night's astrophotography session, so some (illustrated!) answers for those who might be interested in how the space-sausage is made:
Canon EOS T6i digital SLR camera; I'm still learning how to best configure for photographing different astronomical objects: For single-exposure images like those I took last night, I found the Moon was best photographed at around 100 ISA and 1/8-second exposure (plus a partial-aperture shield over the telescope tube) were; the Great Orion Nebula was best at 800 ISA and 15-second exposure (full aperture), but will be WAY better once the sky background isn't so bright with the nearly full Moon making skyglow:
Notice no lens? It’s attached via an Orion Wide-Field T-Adapter at prime focus (no eyepiece magnification). Basically, this setup turns the telescope into one huge, f/9 telephoto lens!
For naked-eye observations, I use a wonderful assortment of 2" body eyepieces, my faves being the big 100-degree-field-of-view Explore Scientifics that make it feel like I'm floating in space; here’s my eyepiece case with all the other related gear:
Yes, that's an eyepatch in the eyepiece case! If you cover the eye you're not using to look through the eyepiece, your vision doesn't get all squinty from squeezing it shut. Plus you can swap to that covered eye later for seeing darker details, as it's all nicely dark-adapted!
The telescope is an Orion Skyview Pro 100mm f/9 (900mm) rare-earth-glass apochromatic refractor; the special ED lens material prevents color distortion when looking at bright objects like those I photographed last night. Typically, a low-cost, standard-glass-lens refractor telescope makes false-color halos around bright things (most lenses bring each color to focus at different places, but special-glass, multi-lens setups like this produce almost as perfect color-correction as with a reflector!
And everything mounted on an iOptron IEQ30 Pro German Equatorial mount with built-in through-the-mount polar-alignment telescope for making sure it perfectly counters the Earth's rotation (plus a leveling bubble so it sits perfectly flat); I have yet to get it to auto-align, so those are huge. But it also means I need to manually operate (via a hand-held controller) the clock drive to follow sidereal motion (speed 1 - I can also bump it up all the way to speed 8 to quickly slew across the sky, or interim speeds to center objects) - no biggie, just another quirk I need to figure out. This thing is a HUGE leap over mounts I've used in the past, and would heartily recommend it. HEAVY, but that also means STABLE. And so smooth:
The longer you do astronomy, the better your collection of gear gets, because it lasts forever if you take care of it and you can tailor your setup with small improvements over time.
Maybe more info than you wanted - if you read to here, I hope you found it useful!
