Astrophotography

[Kas]

Does anyone know of a forum or community focused on Astrophotography using Canon equipment ?

[Kas]

That's the other thing that I considered.  The cost to make the change over.  A major commitment in dollars.  The outcome has great potential but I suffer from the same issues (lack of dark skies, dragging my equipment out nightly).  Thanks for your input.

Ken

[chikung]

wow, thank you for that info, I'm in love with astronomy and the stars 🙂

[TCampbell]

Me too!

Something to keep in mind though is that deep-space astrophotography requires long exposure times. This creates a whole new set of challenges beyond the camera.

Most AP guys spend more money on their telescope "mount" then they do on their telescope. TRACKING becomes a very delicate issue. The telescope mount should be an equatorial mount -- not an altitude/azimuth mount (alt/az is fine for very short exposures of bright objects... say, the moon) then the exposure time will be short enough that tracking and field rotation wont be an issue. When doing faint objects where each exposure is several minutes long, field rotation and tracking become a really big deal.

I get a lot of people who buy a telescope and then want to do astrophotography but the equipment scope and mount wont be able to track an object very well for much longer than 30-60 seconds (sometimes they can't even track well enough even for a 15 second exposure.)