What drew me to astronomy back in the early 1980’s was the math involved, and there is a lot of it.
My father purchased a cheap telescope from Sears, back then, but could never find any objects that he wanted to observe. To accomplish this a thorough knowledge of what are known as Right Ascension and Declination is needed.
If you were ever to go to a star party viewing venue you would see that amateur’s are spending about 2 hours just setting up and prepping their equipment during daylight hours.
A lot of times I will just go to a dark site and take at least 3-5 minutes of exposures with a 14mm lens.
This will give me at least 8 hours of processing time back at home to identify what I have captured, which is what I really like to do.
However, I do not feel the additional $3,500 in equipment is worth it for what my interests are within astronomy.
The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the closest to the earth, and can be observed with the naked eye, or binoculars, between the constellations of Pegasus and Cassiopeia. That is one of the reasons the picture looks so clear and well defined. If you took that same equipment and tried to capture most other Deep Sky Objects you would be disappointed. Spend an additional $7K-8K and it may work.
All tolled right now I have about $7,000 worth of equipment already and it keeps me satisfied and busy.
well, it’s not about the camera … it’s about the inverse square law of light propagation. Photons are spread too thin over such distance and as such, there’s not enough energy in them to be detected. That’s the reason for such long exposure times as Celticstar mentioned, so enough photons is catched and imprinted.
You got that one right.
So many factors to consider.
In one of the pictures I posted showing 6 constellations I shot all together a lot of the stars you see in the shot are not visible to the naked eye.
Regarding using cell phones for this sort of thing, you would need at least the additional expense of a very sturdy tripod for about $200 and an intervalometer at $20, to trigger the shutter, because you can not do it hand held. NOBODY that is serious about astrophotography uses a cell phone that I am aware of.
One thing I never mentioned before is that I always shoot in RAW format giving me individual frames of about 20+Mb in size.
Great stuff @sfadams ,
Your son is playing really nicely and I dig the photos👍,
I live about 5 minutes from Melbourne airport and used to get to see the planes all time, they are cool😎
Never bothered taking photos, I have to many other bad habits:joy:
Cheers Brian
It’s the size of the lens (aperture) that matters so unless you want a phone with a gigantic lens stuck on it, you’re limited to the “magic” of computational photography
I have been to the Arecibo radio telescope in Peurto Rico. The telescope collapsed 12/1/2020. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) will now de-commissioned it because they do not have the money to rebuild it… Sad. I t has been operating since November 1963.
Arecibo was a working radio telescope, not (primarily) used for SETI
It had a long history of radio astronomy discoveries. First radar mapping of most of the solar system, lots of deep space observations. Found the first exoplanet, etc.
No, sadly nothing as poetic as that. They are introverts and eat anything they can get their paws on at a table for one.
