Astrophotography on a Shoe String?

I want to do time lapse Astrophotography on a tight budget.
Things such as galaxies and nebula.

What telescope/mount/guidance would be cheapest,
but still be able to take good 30 minute plus time lapse photographs?

I guess not.

"bucky" wrote in message
t...
I want to do time lapse Astrophotography on a tight budget.
Things such as galaxies and nebula.

What telescope/mount/guidance would be cheapest,
but still be able to take good 30 minute plus time lapse photographs?

buckyballs wrote:
I guess not.

"bucky" wrote in message
t...
I want to do time lapse Astrophotography on a tight budget.
Things such as galaxies and nebula.

What telescope/mount/guidance would be cheapest,
but still be able to take good 30 minute plus time lapse photographs?




A few issues with your request, and a suggestion:

30 minutes is a really long time for a mount to track well without an
autoguider, and at that, it's going to require a substantially _good_
mount ($$).

Galaxies and Nebula are the hardest of all targets. They are very dim,
very diffuse, and have extremely subtle contrast variations that require
a huge dynamic range of pixel depth in a camera ($$).

I suggest you try star clusters and those few large, bright nebula like
M8, M17, and M42, using a DSLR or film camera and a small fast refractor
(400mm to 800mm focal length), on a late model CG-5 or an older (or
newer if you prefer) Vixen GP. A guiding method might still be
necessary, especially for film. With the DSLR you can take a long
sequence of short exposures for stacking, tossing those that have
excessive star trailing due to tracking errors in the mount. The CG-5 or
the GP mounts can be fine tuned and polar aligned well enough to give
decent 30 second unguided subs for stacking.

"bucky" wrote in message
t...
I want to do time lapse Astrophotography on a tight budget.
Things such as galaxies and nebula.
snip
Nothing in the sky except moon, meteors and artificial satellites moves or
changes fast enough to justify time lapse photography. Try flowers.


Gerry Foley
http://www.pbase.com/gfoley9999/
http://www.wilowud.net/
http://home.columbus.rr.com/gfoley
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian...ypt/egypt.html
http://foley.foleypages.net/~gerry/

bucky wrote:
I want to do time lapse Astrophotography on a tight budget.
Things such as galaxies and nebula.

What telescope/mount/guidance would be cheapest,
but still be able to take good 30 minute plus time lapse photographs?

Do you really mean time lapse, as in taking a sequence of snapshots that
are then registered and sequenced to form a short movie, or do you mean
time *exposure*, in which film or an electronic detector (CCD, etc) is
left exposed to the sky for a long period of time to image dim fuzzies?

If the latter (as I suspect), you may want to try piggy-back photography
first, which uses the camera's own lens, with the camera mounted as a
piece on top of the mount (either directly, or on top of a mounted
telescope). Decent shots can be had with just a few minutes of exposure
in this configuration.

You may want to take a look at Michael Covington's book on astrophoto-
graphy, if it's still available.

--
Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.html

On Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:34:14 GMT, "Gerard M Foley"
wrote:

Nothing in the sky except moon, meteors and artificial satellites moves or
changes fast enough to justify time lapse photography. Try flowers.

He obviously means long-exposure photography.

And BTW, there are deep space objects that you could use true time lapse
imaging on, including several nebulas, some double stars, some high
proper motion stars, and the occasional supernova. All of these can show
changes on a scale ranging from a few days to a few years, and are thus
good time lapse candidates.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Brian Tung wrote:
bucky wrote:
I want to do time lapse Astrophotography on a tight budget.
Things such as galaxies and nebula.

What telescope/mount/guidance would be cheapest,
but still be able to take good 30 minute plus time lapse photographs?

Do you really mean time lapse, as in taking a sequence of snapshots that
are then registered and sequenced to form a short movie, or do you mean
time *exposure*, in which film or an electronic detector (CCD, etc) is
left exposed to the sky for a long period of time to image dim fuzzies?

If the latter (as I suspect), you may want to try piggy-back photography
first, which uses the camera's own lens, with the camera mounted as a
piece on top of the mount (either directly, or on top of a mounted
telescope). Decent shots can be had with just a few minutes of exposure
in this configuration.

You may want to take a look at Michael Covington's book on astrophoto-
graphy, if it's still available.

--
Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.html

The man can do what Tunc Tezel did and do humanity a real favor.

He can track the position of a planet against the stellar background
just as the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomers did.He can assemble a
series of images of planetary positions to each other using the stellar
background as a reference but paying no attention to a celestial sphere
structure.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...loop_tezel.jpg

Those images of Saturn and Jupiter are taken over the course of a year
against the same stellar background.It is when time lapse footage is
applied that Copernican heliocentric reasoning really blossoms as we
see how the Earth's orbital motion overtakes those tow outer planets

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...2000_tezel.gif

For once astrophotographers can really help humanity with material like
this,the ability to render the Copernican heliocentric system
accurately and bringing a breath of fresh air to this discipline.If as
an astrophotographer,the original posters recognises how the
heliocentric motion of the planets is seen directly from Earth he will
detest the stupid Newtonian mutation which determines otherwise.

"For to the earth planetary motions appear sometimes direct, sometimes
stationary, nay, and sometimes retrograde. But from the sun they are
always seen direct, " Newton

oriel36 wrote:

The man can do what Tunc Tezel did and do humanity a real favor.

You are an idiot!

He can track the position of a planet against the stellar background
just as the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomers did.He can assemble a
series of images of planetary positions to each other using the stellar
background as a reference but paying no attention to a celestial sphere
structure.

The only thing you continue to do is demonstrate that you are a loon.

Linux Utilisateur wrote:
oriel36 wrote:

The man can do what Tunc Tezel did and do humanity a real favor.

You are an idiot!

He can track the position of a planet against the stellar background
just as the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomers did.He can assemble a
series of images of planetary positions to each other using the stellar
background as a reference but paying no attention to a celestial sphere
structure.

The only thing you continue to do is demonstrate that you are a loon.

Oriel is in fact an interesting development in AI. If you make your AI
look like it's crazy, then the horrible inconsistencies in its
behaviour won't look like it's a computer program, but the erratic
ramblings of a madman.

I can prove he's a computer program, just by the fact that he'll
probably respond to me, and his post will have little, if anything to
do with my post. He'll probably go on about newtonian motion and how
it's bumkus, despite the fact that I haven't refuted anything he's said.

Ernie Dunbar wrote:
Linux Utilisateur wrote:
oriel36 wrote:

The man can do what Tunc Tezel did and do humanity a real favor.

You are an idiot!

He can track the position of a planet against the stellar background
just as the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomers did.He can assemble a
series of images of planetary positions to each other using the stellar
background as a reference but paying no attention to a celestial sphere
structure.

The only thing you continue to do is demonstrate that you are a loon.

Oriel is in fact an interesting development in AI. If you make your AI
look like it's crazy, then the horrible inconsistencies in its
behaviour won't look like it's a computer program, but the erratic
ramblings of a madman...

The postings in question have always reminded me of
the posts, long ago, about Turkey and Armenian genocide.

Is this the USENET version of showing one's age? :-)

Laura Halliday VE7LDH "Que les nuages soient notre
Grid: CN89mg pied a terre..."
ICBM: 49 16.05 N 122 56.92 W - Hospital/Shafte