Astrophotography on a Shoe String?

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.