Astro Imaging

What is the AstroTarget Planner? It’s a free tool I built for myself — and because it helped me, I thought I’d make it available for anyone to use. You enter your location, Bortle level, focal length and the camera you use, and it will give you a list of objects that are visible tonight,…

Before you start To work out your sub-exposure time, you need three things: your sky’s Bortle rating, your telescope or lens focal ratio, and your camera’s read noise in electrons. Plug those into the calculator below and it does the rest. As a real-world example — my own setup is a Bortle 5 suburban sky,…

Astrophotography, a fascinating and difficult branch of photography, calls for specialized instruments and techniques. The power of a remote shutter release is an essential element of astrophotography for getting the best images. On this page, I’ll walk you through the mechanics of remote camera control for astrophotography in this post and illustrate how to get…

Astrophotography can be a very rewarding discipline because capturing breathtaking photos of astronomical bodies such as stars, galaxies, and planets is extremely challenging. Yet, learning astrophotography can be difficult, especially if you’re just getting started. The 500 Rule astrophotography formula is one of the best methods for amateur astrophotographers to calculate the length of exposures they…

A little technique I learned called astrophotography dithering has made a huge improvement to my images. It can be tough to capture high-quality photographs of objects in space because of various factors, including atmospheric distortion, equipment limitations, and light pollution. It’s also important to use a star tracker mount to follow the movement of the…

Before any session of imaging with your equatorial telescope mount, you’ll need to carry out accurate Polar Alignment first. There are various ways to do this and I’ll discuss my favourite way plus some alternatives you may like to try. Before going any further, please note that you are Polar Aligning the mount or tracker,…

Auto guiding is a technique that astrophotographers use to improve the tracking of stars and deep-sky objects so that longer exposures are possible. It requires a little extra equipment, a guide scope, and a guiding camera, but is quite cheap and easy to do. In this article, I will explain what exactly auto-guiding can do…

In astrophotography, you need to use long exposure night photography because there is so little light in the night sky. The objects we try to capture are often very faint and far away, so we need to maximise the amount of light the camera is exposed to. Long-exposure night photography is a great way to…

“There’s something special about capturing the glow of the Milky Way as it cuts across the entire sky.” Timothy Printy – The Astroscopers’ Astronomy Group in Chiefland, Florida. Have you ever seen those amazing pictures taken at night with the landscape and an amazing horizon filled with stars and an incredible Milky Way arch across the sky? Have you…