For years now I've wanted to take photos of fireworks, on New Years Eve I never had a clear view of them. What do fireworks have to do with Space? Well, the camera settings are similar and it was the beginning of my interests of taking photos of things in the night sky.
A year or two ago I happened to witness a lunar eclipse. I attempted to take photos with my DSLR and 70mm lens, but the photos were of poor quality. The settings were all wrong and 70mm just wasn't long enough.
The next day Flickr.com was spammed with hundreds of lunar eclipse photos. That day my love for astronomy was born...or reignited from my Primary School days.
Not long ago I happened across Dark Atmospheres photography - a website of Roth Ritter's photography. His astronomy photos were spectacular! There were close-ups of the craters on the Moon, the beautiful red nebula and clusters of stars. I was inspired.
I looked up the camera he used and was taken aback by the price of it, but then I found out astrophotography doesn't have cost an arm and a leg. To get some really fantastic photos of the Universe you only need to pay $2000-$3000 on an auto tracking telescope and less than $100 on a camera adapter. Sometimes you don't even need an adapter to take photos. If you've got your own tripod (like I do) just sit your DSLR on that and set it up so the camera lens is near the eyepiece and use Live View as a lovely little shortcut. Mind you, this is a more professional set up.
A novice astrophotography set up just requires a 5"- 8" telescope (that is the amount of light that can enter the telescope - the larger the better) and like photography it needs a large f/stop. In the taking photos on Earth world (especially concert photographers) we like our f stops to be between f/1.2-f/2.0. In astrophotography that kind of f stop is going to be expensive. Something like f/5 or 6 is good enough.
Depending on where you are buying it from the cost of this telescope would be $500-$800. It depends on what you need and the build of the model. That's cheaper than a beginner level SLR and it could get you a nice non-L telephoto lens.
The most important part is your skill with a telescope and the amount of patience you need to get a photo of objects in Space. It can take hours.
I like to compare cameras (DSLRs) to telescopes. It makes it easier to separate the awesome from the crap.
Telescopes can come cheap like digital point and shoot cameras. Similarly to them they don't have the best optics, they may boast a big magnification (much like digital zoom) and their batteries don't last long (if your telescope is an auto tracker it takes 8 AA batteries).
You also got your DSLR range. The best in the camera world are the Canon, Nikon, Pentax and Olympus. In the telescope world it's the Dobsonian, Celestron, SCT and Orion.
I've adopted the idea that the Dobsonian is a Canon EOS of the telescope world. Their L Series is the Dobsonian 12" collapsable auto tracker, and it costs as much. In fact I'd go as far to call it the 5D.
The one I've chosen to buy is a Dobsonian 8" Skywatcher Newtonian Reflector and to me it's a Canon 350D (or a 500D to those new to Canon SLRs).
In 2006 I bought my DSLR. It was 8 megapixels so I compare this to the '8 inches' in my Dosonian. Did I just say 'my'? Oh well. Mega pixels are important in cameras, inches are important in telescopes. Their is also the build of the telescope to consider, just like the build of lenses for cameras. Remember my boasting of the L Series? Imagine if Canon started making L Series telescopes? Oh the weight, oh the creamy colours of the nebula.
But I shall be using my Canon 40D (a step up from a beginner level SLR) to take astrophotographs and later, much much later a 7D.
I've decided to purchase the Dobsonian 8" on March 2nd, 2010 because it's four years to the day I got my Canon 350D. I sure do love patterns!
It's funny, seasoned astronomers buy their telescope kit piece by piece and that's just what I did when I bought my second DSLR. It's cheaper and you get the best out of your equipment. Will the same happen when I purchase a second telescope? Somewhere my mum just screamed.
Another thing astronomers do is build their own telescope. Yeah...we don't do that in the photography world. Could we?
Well now I've got a lot of cash to save, time to wait, and technical astronomy terms to learn. Oh and I really need to make sure which constellation is which.
Note: I'm a noob. In fact a pre-noob, because I'm yet to have my first telescope. So I've probably got a lot of info on telescopes wrong. It's all very confusing. I'll get it eventually. So keep your criticism to yourself, seasoned astronomers.
In other news: I shall be photographing Tim Rogers on friday.
