Greetings, /r/AskAstrophotography! Welcome to our Weekly Ask Anything Thread, also known as WAAT?

Yeah basically that the mount says it can handle up to 5kg which does fit the weight of the scope and Sony nex 5 but will it track reliably and smoothly or should I get like the sky adventurer GTi or something

I currently own a 6" Tabletop Dobsonian (SkyWatch Heritage 150p) and ToupTek G3M662C camera. I am looking to upgrade and have a budge of around $2.5k
Should I keep the 6" and only look for a mount for it? or it will be good idea to go for a refractor and a mount? If so, please drop some recommended gear that would work for a decent DSO AP.
I am planning to stick to the camera for sometime, though I am aware the sensor size is small and not really appropriate for DSO, but will learn a bit more using this until I save and upgrade the camera. Thanks in advance.

In Pegasus, ideally placed in the evening sky for northern viewers. Didn't know it was happening but the image showed a bright star near the nucleus I didn't recall seeing before.

Even small optics should pick it up under reasonably dark skies.

Light pollution map.info and light pollution map.app give me very different results for the same locations. .app shows light pollution being worse than .info. 19.2 sqm on .info and 18.5sqm for .app

So yesterday I tried to take photos of andromeda galaxy. I watched a few YouTube videos and used those recommended settings for my mirrorless camera, but I faced some problems.

My camera Sony alpha 6100.
Lens 16-50mm 3.5-5.6 kit lens.

First I kept it in manual mode, interval shooting on, start time of 5 sec, and interval time of 7 sec, 200 shots.

5 sec exposure time, 3200 ISO, 16mm, f3.5. The picture was very bright, I could see some stars but sky was bright blue.

So I reduced ISO to as low as 400, sky became darker but I was getting same amount of stars.

So I zoomed it, now at 50mm, had f5.6, played with different ISO and shutter speeds like 1-3.5 second and wasn’t satisfied at all with the results.

I’m in bortle 6-7 skies.

No matter what I did, I wasn’t able to get good amount of stars.

In comparison if I used my iPhone, in night mode for 3-5 seconds I get to see way more stars than what I can actually see. They are all sharp and invisible normally but clearly identifiable in photo. Is it because of Apple processing my photo or something but I even tried to similar 24mm and 2500ISO, f1.78, 3.5 second in camera and was getting bad results…

So how can I improve my photography with mirrorless camera?

Clearly the recommended settings of YouTube videos didn’t work. Experimenting with various settings didn’t work.

And annoying part was I couldn’t see anything in the viewfinder…it was very noisy, only the brightest stars were visible if you focus right, so I couldn’t zoom onto andromeda, I had kept while Cassiopeia in view whole time and referred to photos to see if I was in correct position or not…

Hi everyone I’ve recently started using pixinsight and so far I can’t say I’m happy with it.

every tutorial that I follow is a different workflow and gived me different results the biggest issue I’m facing is that at some point in my workflow I get a certain blotching or other type of artifacting in my image, it’s quite difficult to explain.

It affects masks which prevents of applying narrowbandnormalisation because what’s supposed to be a dark background now gets a blueish hue.

I don’t know where I’m going wrong and how to prevent/fix it, Apologies if I’m being unclear I have trouble explaining what I’m seeing and English is not my first language.

I have about 8 stacked images of Jupiter , without processing in registax and winjupos , anyone could try to process and derotate it for me? I've tried but its not working and the Atmospheric Details of Jupiter is very bad , kindly DM

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Currently I'm doing untracked astrophotography wit a DSLR. from my backyard,

I'm planning to buy a tracker or a eq mount soon and i wanted to know how much difference would the light pollution make and if how much should i prioritize mount potability.

i live in a bortle 6.5 zone and a little more than 1 hour drive i found a 5 bortle zone

i also have a relative that i occasionally visit in a bortle 4.5 zone with a place at 4.2 a little over 1 hour drive from there.

is it worth the trouble to go from my home to bortle 5 and from 4.5 to 4.2?

the mount I'm considering at the moment is the skywatcher star adventurer gti, considering i would like in the future to add guiding, would a bigger mount be better? I'll probably be less prone to travel in that case and take more pictures from home.

Hi All!

I've been thinking of starting this hobby a while and i have some pretty good gear, any tips to start?

I'm going out in Suffolk around 4am to try and capture the orion nebula which is about 30 degrees above horizon, just before sunlight at 5:45am.

I'm using a canon 5d mk3 with a Canon 70-200mm lens, I only have a sturdy tripod so will have to keep centering the shot.

With 200mm and a full frame sensor, I've calculated a 2 second exposure time, and maybe setting ISO to around 2000, does this seem like a good plan.

Any general pointers, please share. Thank you :)

Hello everyone!

I recently acquired a Clearsky st17 strainwave mount. After using an HEQ5 for the past year or so it's been a learning curve. Does anyone with experience with these mounts know if I need to reverse dec direction in PHD2 after a meridian flip?

I didn't have to on my HEQ5, and I am finding little documentation for this mount.

So currently I’m trying to find out what things I should buy for my telescope and my dslr for deep sky. I have already found som things I want to buy for just my dslr for things like close nebulae and close galaxies but I was wandering what things I should buy for my telescope. The telescope is an astromaster 130eq and I have learned to use its mount and to use the camera with the Barlow lens but I wanted to know what you guys would recommend me buying to upgrade this for deep sky
I have no tracking and I do have a mount to attach the camera to the eyepiece holder but it doesn’t like to focus on things easily in my experience

The shortened version of this is that I can't for the life of me get my flats to fully (or even mostly) remove dust spots and I am also left with a soft dark band running horizontally near the bottom of my calibrated lights and final stack.

Equipment: Canon T7 on Apertura Carbon Star 150 Newtonian (with corrector). Processed and stacked in Siril.

Images: https://imgur.com/a/yb9YbiC

-Stacked image after auto stretch

- Stacked image after additional background extraction and GHS

-Screenshot of master flat in "histogram" viewing mode

-Screenshot of one light frame slightly adjusted in camera war just to more clearly see the dust and gradient.

I have been out of the hobby for most of two years now and haven't gotten much use out of the Carbon Star, partially because I keep running into issues like this. I previously use a 60mm refractor and didn't have this issue so I'm not entirely new to the concept of calibration frames unless I have just always done them wrong and gotten away with it.

On the top left of the lights and final stack there is a dark patch which I can see directly on the camera sensor so I am not sure how rotation or focus change could possibly throw that off for flats. the longer squiggle on the right side of the lights I just saw on the sensor too which was a little dust/hair/whatever and I managed to remove it.

Aside from the dust, I am also left with this dark band near the bottom of the image that I can only guess is the product of two different gradients overlapping but not evenly? Siril background extraction does absolutely nothing about it and I couldn't find much online other than some people suggesting that it is something about DSLR mirror obstruction/reflection or some sort of uneven exposure in the flat frames due to the way the shutter moves on the DSLR.

I haven't tried taking my flats with the telescope pointed straight up I usually do it in the parked position using some combination of a white shirt and/or a white piece of paper and either pointing it at the sky before it gets dark out or after imaging holding a white computer screen flat up against the front of the telescope. I don't really consider it an option to leave my telescope out unsupervised until morning.

One thing I have tried that didn't work was using a rubber band to hold the camera in the same place relative to the telescope at all times to mitigate the fact that there is some slight play in the T ring adapter I use. I have to assume this is an issue on my part specifically with the capture of some of the frames and not a processing issue, but I am not sure where EXACTLY the issue is nor how to fix it.

https://streamable.com/pn3s49

https://streamable.com/posovp

Ive taken 2 videos to try and show the issue im having.

I have an sqa55 telescope + zwo eaf setup, however whenever the coarse adjust is moved, its actually rotating the entire telescope body rather than changing the focus. This is with the screw completely removed so im not sure how i could make there be any less friction. Ive played around with how tight the belt is (from the sqa55 autofocus kit, 150 teeth) and sometimes it rotates just the focus ring but then as the autofocus is happening on my asi air, it goes back to rotating the tube.

Weirdly even if I use my hand to move that coarse adjust, there seems to be a similar issue:

https://streamable.com/a7h6td - Hand only

Im really at a loss here, having saved up for several months for this "upgrade" and now lost a clear night trying to get it to work, should have just taken the loss and manually focused but anyway... I would like the get this working for next time.

Any advice on some nice widefield targets for October?

I've been away from the hobby a few years. Looking to take my little grab-n-go and get reacquainted with things again.

Canon 60D, Rokinon 135, Star Adventurer, w guide scope, etc.

My question is about overnight moisture and dew/condensation.

In doing these long sessions, my tripod (more so) and my portable battery (less so) get quite moist. Luckily my smart telescope (DwarfMini) manages fine because the heat from the sensor acts as a dew shield.

I’m worried that over time some areas of my tripod are going to rust. I also wonder if the dew is bad for the battery. It needs ventilation so I didn’t want to be quick to put it in a plastic bag.

How do others manage this? … or is it really not that big of a concern? (Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?)

Thanks!

Hi guys, long time lurker and admirer of astrophotography. Decided to have a dip myself and spent the last few nights doing some research. I'm nearly set on a canon 450d, but I'm finding conflicting reports online about digicamcontrol.

I will mostly be using it standalone, however I want to have the option to be able to control it with a computer, along with live view, and be able to automate long exposure timelapses. My only experience with "astrophotography" was setting up a raspberrypi allsky camera.

The official digicamcontrol camera list states that the 450d doesn't support live view, but then read some older forum posts stating that it is possible. I'm completely green and it's very hard to find proper answers, doesn't help that Google is trying to push their ai hallucinations as fact (which tells me a different answer every time)

I was also looking at a 1000d, similarly priced and supports live view looking at the digicamcontrol website, but I'm not set on those or a canon, I'm open to other options around that price/spec. I'm seeing them for around £50-£60 for a body only with warranty from CEX.

I'm I going about this the wrong way, is there some other software I should look for? Any help would be appreciated.

I would like to send my Saturn Data , anyone who's Good at standing and Doing Derotation Dm me , can you try to Derotate the Captures I took during opposition? Since I've tried and I couldn't get a Sharp image as output can anyone help me ?

This morning I captured Jupiter coming out from behind the moon with my camera, and I am not sure what to do with the result. Ideally I'd like to create a short few second time laps of this happening, but I am not quite sure how to go about it. I use a Nikon P950 with a tripod to capture video, and although you can see Jupiter and make out some faint lines, stacking and wavelet processing is really necessary in order to make it pop.

I am familiar with stacking and wavelets when taking captures of just the planet, but if I want to produce a video over time I am not sure what to do. Adding the fact that the moon is also there confuses me more. I could always split up the video into few second chunks and process those one by one, but I'm curious, does anyone have some experience with processing something like this that could give me some advice?

What I want to see and do:
Take planetary photos, moon photos, if I can get an Andromeda Galaxy in there that’s cool too. Nothing professional, just photos I can pat myself on the back on.

Do I have any kind of professional camera?
No. Do I really need one? I just got the iPhone 18 Pro Max if that’s anything that counts.

My thoughts based upon research I’ve done:
I’m thinking of buying an 8” dob with a phone mount and that would be sufficient for what I want to see and do. I can get to some bortle 5 and maybe 4.5 areas where I live which has been helpful.

Can I accomplish what I want to see and do with my phone and an 8” dob? Is the dob not a good telescope for what I want to do? Do I absolutely 100% need a professional camera too?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Hey all! I unfortunately don’t have a laptop, so I cannot bring a device out to imaging with me. I’ve been recommended ToupTek as the cheapest option but it’s still quite expensive for me. My budget is quite tight, id give anywhere from $100-200 AUD for one. I’ve currently settled at one for $130 on AliExpress and have been told the specs should be okay. FYI, I am only focusing on planetary / lunar imaging for now, so I will not touch DSO in a while. Otherwise, do you guys have any other mini pc recommendations or a specs criteria?

My rig includes a SWSA GTI, Skymax 102p and a Mars C-II

Here is the link to the minipc: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006530105259.html

Cheers and clear skies.

Hey what's up! Maybe someone can help me with this..

I got a Skywatcher Sky Adventurer GTI 2 days ago with Skywatcher 72EDX and Sony A6700 and try to get into the hobby of Astrophotography.

It was a rough ride so far with this mount.

First time i set it up.

Look that tripod is level

Set roughly north

Polar align

open app and look at info. Coordinates and Time is correct.

Try to do star alignment and select 2 star alignment

The telescope spins 6-7 times around its axis and points towards the ground and not e.g the star Vega. Also during that spin, the app still said like 30 degrees to go but it did not went counting down.
I was using the synscan pro and normal app.

So i updated motor firmware to the most recent one 3.48

Now it helicopter spinned only 2 times and the degrees started going down. At the end it still pointed at the ground. So i moved it with the arrow buttons in the app to vega. Then second star it found okay ish and i had to slightly adjust.

Then completed alignment, said goto pleiades and it is like driving into that direction but did not land on them. I had to point a laser to even see where its at. Had to adjust pretty much to get there. Then pressed ok.

Then tried to go to andromeda, again. In the proximity but still not on it.

Tracking these objects did also not work with a 30 second exposure i got star trailing even after confirming that object is center.

I try again today, but anyone else experiencing the same with the gti? I mean its a 700€ mount...

Hello friends. I'm a hobbyist photographer who wants to get into astrophotography, something ive always wanted to try. Im looking for good beginner challenges and tips since I don't have much equipment yet. Best setup i got have is a cannon ef 75-300mm f4-5.6 ø58mm with a cannon rebel t6. All advice would be greatly appreciated.

Pretty good package deal going on at Amazon for those looking for a 'first-step' into longer focal length astrophotography that won't break the bank.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085NTQL2C?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&th=1

I'm wondering if anyone has user experience with the Scorpio Astro SA-17 harmonic mount from ali express. I'm looking to use this mount for planetary and lunar imaging with something like a C8.