What would you get? I
What would you get? I
Words get in the way of what I meant to say.
Originally Posted by andnowimbroke
- Camera: $500
- Telescope: $1000
- Mount with motor drive: $2,000
- Moving to the mountains to get away from light pollution: $4,000
- Divorce after your wife refused to go with you: $80,000
- Getting solid 16x20 shots of fairly close galaxies: Priceless.
There's some things money can't buy, for everything else, there's living as a hermit in the mountains.
A $50,000 telescope, mount, and camera in the city can be outdone by a $1000 in optimal locations. I consider myself lucky to live only four hours away from some nearly-world-class night skies (in the high Oregon desert), so that's where I drive to do my imaging.
Another important thing to consider is that, in general, the motor drive is the most important part of the system -- it will determine the maximum length of exposure.
A good starter kit, IMHO, is a T3i ($700), Orion ED80 ($400), and<span>Sirius EQ-G ($1200). When you're ready to take on the added complexity of autoguiding, you can add a second scope (e.g. 60 - 70mm or so) and something like a Meade DSI Pro.
For the next level up might look something like this: T3i (because it's lightweight!), Vixen ED103S ($2000), Losmandy G11 ($3,000), plus auto-guiding setup.
The rabbit hole just keeps going deeper. $5,000+ SBIG cameras, $5,000+ refractors, $10,000+Takahashi mounts, etc.
The site (that didn
Words get in the way of what I meant to say.
This is an exciting question.
I'm assuming you don't want to know what I would get (I have an Astrophysics Mach 1 GTO mount, an AP130GT refractor, and a 5DII, + accessories)
I think you're wondering, what should *you* get. And that, of course, depends on what kinds of pictures you want to take and how much money you are willing to spend.
I think Daniel has it about right: location is the most important thing. Assuming you've got that settled (or are willing to drive and port all your equipment to a dark site), the mount is next most important, followed by telescope, followed by camera.
Personally, I would want a high end mount (Astrophysics or Takahashi), but this will cost $7000+ new. One can sometimes find nice Takahashi mounts used for 2-3K. Others have gotten great results with less expensive mounts (such as the Losmandy G11, around 3K), but these people have far more skill than I do. It depends on how much tinkering you're willing to do.
For wide field astrophotography, I'd get a small refractor (the Orion ED80 is Daniel suggests is supposed to be great, an 85mm Takahashi FSQ would be even better). For photos of galaxies, I'd want something with a little more aperture (4" +, depending on what you can afford... larger scopes will require larger and more expensive mounts).
For the camera, I'm partial to DSLRs, and any of them that have live view will be great. If you have the $$$, you can get better results with a $10K camera with active cooling.
Getting good shots of galaxies (esp ones that would stand up to large printing) is very difficult. It requires skill, expensive equipment, and excellent conditions. Bernal Andreo gets really good galaxy pictures with fairly modest equipment (though sill probably around 30K for scope, mount, and camera). You can check out his website, with sample pictures and a description of his equipment.
The site won
Words get in the way of what I meant to say.
There's a lot you can do with just a tripod and camera, one of them is star trails. That will give you a real taste of what astrophotography is like: the difficulty of nailing critical focus, finding out that your battery only lasts 1 hour, and your memory card fills up after 2, airplanes ruining some shots, wind vibration, etc.
Personally, I got bored of star trails real fast, so if you're like me then you'll want to just skip to the next step, which is the motorized tripod. Yep, skip the telescope altogether and just go straight to the motor driven tripod. The Kenko SkyMemo ($1k) is a good choice. Start out with wide or ultra-wide lenses. Then as you improve your technique (e.g. learn drift alignment), you can go to longer and longer focal lengths and exposure durations. If you want to make things really easy on yourself, find a local astronomy club (or just astronomer -- there's millions on cloudynights.com) and have them teach you in person (we love newbies).
Then at some point you jump from a lens to a telescope. For the software side of things, Deep Sky Stacker is very easy to learn, and will let you start with just dumping all your files in there. (After a while, you'll learn all about dark frames, flat frames, etc.)
Googled the kenko and got all excited when I saw a FS sign with $500 after it. The bold SOLD kinda hit me hard though. Got CN bookmarked. Thanks for the replies guys.
Words get in the way of what I meant to say.
I head the Hubble is going to be retired in not too long. You could problably pick that up for a good price, that way you won
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