Cookbook Content
(Note: I’ll come back and add some screenshots at a later date!) Astrophotography is great when it all comes together, but sometimes that road is full of frustrations and problems. I bought my first “real” telescope in 2015 (a Celestron 6SE) that whetted my appetite for the hobby. Whilst the Alt-AZ based scope didn’t lend … Continue reading Capture, Process, Post-Process M42 Orion Nebula
In an ideal world, we’d set up our telescopes, on our very accurate mounts, that are accurately polar aligned and no matter where we pointed our telescope and camera, we’d be able to lock in on a target for hours on end to capture those faint DSOs without a care for any object slowly drifting … Continue reading My guide to auto-guiding Part 1: Configuring PHD2
Did you know that you can remotely wake up a sleeping PC by sending a “magic packet” to your network adapter? I find this immensely useful for my PC that sits with my remote imaging setup. With a normal PC, you have two options when you want to walk away from your PC and have … Continue reading Wake-On-Lan: Sleeping and Waking up your Remote Imaging PC
Plate solving is the action of resolving what you see in the sky to match where your (computer controlled) mount thinks it is in the sky. For those transitioning from using a handset to computer controlled, see this step as being roughly the same topic as a 1-star align: validating the position of where your … Continue reading Plate solving using AstroTortilla and SharpCap
I’ve been very humbled to have a couple of my images appear in the BBC’s Sky At Night Magazine, with one landing me one of their prizes. I love taking pictures of the Moon. I think it’s one of the easiest objects in the night sky to help practice your astrophotography skills. It’s not without … Continue reading Imaging the Moon Part 1: The basic capture
For a long time I was a user of Stellarium – however, I wouldn’t say I was using it to its full potential. I struggled with its quirky interface, and didn’t quite get to grips with the requirements to connect it to my mount and scope. Stellarium is resigned to my phone these days. Enter … Continue reading Using Cartes du Ciel with an ASCOM controlled mount
My enjoyment of astrophotography has increased ten-fold since being able to control my setup from the comfort of my house. Rather than stand outside for long periods of time, or even having to jump in and out of the house all night checking on progress – I much prefer being able to guide, slew, focus … Continue reading The Remotely Controlled Imaging Setup
The ASCOM Platform is the Swiss-Army Knife of software control for your various pieces of astrophotography kit – from mounts, to focusers, to dew heaters and even powered observatory roofs. For us more modest amateurs though, the most important element that ASCOM needs to control, and usually the only required element, is the mount. This … Continue reading Setting up a SkyWatcher Mount with ASCOM Platform and EQMOD
Now that we have a fully polar aligned EQ mount, we can now add our telescopes and imaging equipment. Now, we can’t just place our telescopes on our mounts in any old fashion – not unless you hate your mount and don’t fancy any more than a quick slew around the sky. For your astrophotography … Continue reading The basics: Setting up and balancing the scopes
For long exposures (of which I’ll take to mean over 1 minute in length for any length telescope), setting up your mount correctly – before you even place a telescope on it – is vital. Heck, even battling against a Go-To is made easier if you setup your mount correctly in the first place. And … Continue reading The basics: How to set up your equatorial mount and polar align with a Polemaster
The Amateur Astrophotographer's Cookbook 