Astrophotography

I started my astrophotography journey while looking for a hobby outside of motorsports a few years back before the pandemic, something kind of "convenient" and didn't take a lot of logistics; keeping it simple would mean I could spend more time on it.  About that time, I came across some shots of the Milky Way on my social media which looked pretty cool to me and something I thought I'd want to give a try, and that's how it started.  Like a lot of people, I had started off in the most basic fashion with a tripod and my Nikon camera taking wideview pictures of the Milky Way, and watching a lot of YouTube videos trying to figure out and understand the terminology and processing which was completely new to me; you can use the same tools, but editing a shot of the Orion Nebula is nothing like editing a picture of a Funny Car.

Fast forward a couple of years to today and I'm running a dedicated astrophotography rig that I'm really happy with, and put simply: it just works.  While I'm still imaging mostly in my back yard, it's also completely portable using a 12v battery power box and has been out in the field a couple of times already and worked great.  There's nothing like shooting at a dark spot in the desert where you can see details with the naked eye that you can't in more light polluted locations closer into town.   

What you're not going to see is what made that noise 25 yards into the desert though, maybe it's a coyote, maybe it's a javelina, could be ManBearPig for all I know and to be honest, I'm not that curious to find out when I'm out there by myself.  I've seen enough horror movies to know that's when the nuclear contaminated vertical family tree clan, where the leader's name begins with "Poppa", come out of an old missile silo looking for some sucker to go investigate the noises they're making.  No thanks, I think I'll pass on that one.  

Some of the equipment:

ZWO AM5 mount

Astro-Tech AT92 telescope (500mm @ f5.5)

William Optics Redcat51 (250mm @f5)

ZWO ASIAir Plus controller

ZWO ASI2600MC color camera

ZWO ASI2600MM monochrome camera

ZWO ASI120MM-s camera and 50mm guidescope

ZWO EAF focusers

ZWO Filter wheel with Astronomik R, G, B, S, H, and O filters

Pleiades Pixinsight software