DEEP SPACE
The telescope
I use a Celestron 9.25" schmidt-cassegrain OTA. I personally prefer this style of scope because it has the versatility that allows me to take shots using a hyperstar or a focal reducer to capture the DSO's (deep space objects) I love, as well as planetary images shots using a Barlow/power-mate.
The mount
For DSO's the mount is probably the most important part of your kit. All the gear matters, but if you don't have a nice steady and smooth tracking mount, you'll never get the shots you want. The Sky-Watcher is an excellent mount allowing for easy polar alignment (as easy as it can be anyway!)
The Camera
I First started shooting with a run of the mill DSLR and this yielded some excellent results. The familiarity with the camera settings and the paired easy to use software (BACKYARD EOS) software means anyone can start shooting straight away. The down side of DSLR's is that the chip gets hot and causes all sorts of noise in your image. Lots of calibration frames are required to try and eliminate this.
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I used a clip-in style light pollution (CLS) filter to try and block sky glow from all of the street light nearby. This is a necessary piece of kit if you are shooting suburban skies.
Now i use a dedicated astrophotography camera. A ZWO ASI071MC-COOL. A one shot colour camera that for all intents and purposes behaves like a CCD camera, although the chip inside the camera is a CMOS sensor. I chose this camera because it has nice BIG sensor, just as big as the DSLR i was using. On top of the size, the chip is cooled up to 35c degrees below ambient temperature. The consequence of this is fantastic noise reduction, almost to the point that dark and bias calibration frames are not necessary (I still take them though).
Guide SCOPE
The guide scope I use at the moments is a 50mm Orion guide scope. It's used by tracking software to track a star in the sky and send corrective instructions to the mount to ensure accurate tracking of the sky. The goal here is to keep your telescope moving perfectly against the rotation of the earth so that your subject stay still during your exposure.
It works well when I'm using the Hyperstar and shooting with a very wide field of view. However, I'm fast out growing this guide scope and will soon move to an Off-Axis guider.
Working in conjunction with the guide scope is the guide camera. I use the Orion StarShoot Auto-guider. With its high gain abilities, it allows you to bring out any available guide stars. I have never had an issue with this extremely reliable camera.
focal reducer
A Focal Reducers job primary to increase your field of view as well as flatten the light coming towards your sensor. The flattening serves to decrease coma in your image by presenting a flatter, in focus plane of light to the camera. Practically i use it to shoot different DSO's depending on their size. Another side effect is it reduces your F ratio, meaning you can gather more light, quicker.
Light pollution filter
A CLS or light pollution filter is designed to reject the wave lengths of light associated with the light humans shine back up into the atmosphere causing 'sky glow'. It rejects very specific narrow bands of light that are typically not part of the light of your DSO subject. In my Opinon, if you are shooting for less than ideal skies, this is absolutely required. Using this filter I can take much longer exposures. Typically I shoot 5 minute subs.
bahtinov mask
A Bahtinov mask is a tool to help with focusing. At the moment i don't use an auto focuser so this is what I use before starting any shoot. The mask will create diffraction spikes on the stars in your field of view. The aim is to use this to get the middle spike to be perfectly in the middle of the two outer (X) spikes.
Below left is the image you should expect for an in focus image. On the right is an out of focus image.
Flat Frame Collection
Flat Frames are a type of calibration frame used during your image processing. A flat frame should represent a flat plane of light that showcases the various shadows inherent in your image train. The resulting image will be used to calibrate your light frame (photos of the subject), boosting the dark area's caused by vignetting and eliminating small shadows cast by dust on the surfaces present in the image train.
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There are many ways to capture flat frames, but using a hyperstar, i was forced to come up with this solution. Basically a thick white sheet with a stretchy hole cut in the middle. When i'm not using the hyper star i just stretch a piece of white fabric over the scope.
The hyperstar
The Hyperstar is a tool that replaces the secondary mirror of the telescope. The camera mounts in front of the scope which feels unnatural but looks really awesome. The Hyperstar massively increases your field of view as well as your f-ratio (light gathering power). Although controversial, I love this tool! Instead of buying and lugging around a bunch of different telescopes with this, a focal reducer and a powermate, I shoot just about any target i want.
DEW HEATER
When shooting in winter you'll quickly find dew condensing on your telescope which is ruining your photos. I was out in a dark sky site and found myself running into dew issues. With nothing around I had to improvise and wrap some wire around the mirror and corrector plate of the telescope and connected this to a car battery; it worked PERFECTLY! You can buy these or get a dew shield, but my solution worked so well that when i got home i left the wire wrapped around the scope and built a controller using an arduino micro-controller. Cost me a fraction of the store bought options.
The workhorse
None of this is possible without a good deep cycle 12v battery for when your on the road and a high amperage 12v power supply for when you're at home. I used a marine battery and a retrofit Xbox power supply as my power sources.
