I have been photographing, mainly nature and mostly birds, for several decades (one benefit of my being old I guess) and got interested in astrophotography a few years ago. I purchased a Celestron EDGEHD 8" after doing a lot of research online and with a friend that does a little astrophotography. I purchased the Celestron mount made for the EDGEHD 8" along with some eyepieces, battery pack to power the mount, etc. I also purchased the Celestron polar scope, which is essential for aligning the mount to Polaris. I got pretty good at polar alignment and had fun for a while. My first attempts at photography were horrible - one of the reasons being inaccurate guiding which causes stars to be oval shaped, just like you'd get if you took a very long exposure with an unguided telescope/camera. I then got a guide scope and guiding camera. This is a device that locks onto a guide star, gets the info into the guiding camera, and then uses the signal from the camera to correct the position of your mount and telescope. This gave me much better images. At this point I had kind of an epiphany. The focal length of my 8" scope was about 2,000 mm. The focal length of the 9.25" scope is about 2,300 mm. This is way overkill for a lot of the things I thought I would like to photograph. My next step was to abandon the telescope and use my DSLR with a lens made for the DSLR - focal length anywhere from 100 mm to 600 mm - on the Celestron mount while still using the guiding scope and camera. More fun and less frustration with this setup. After a couple of years I just lost interest and sold all the telescope stuff and went back to nature photography.
My thoughts after my "brief" experiences with astrophotography are:
1. Astrophotography is much more difficult than photographing birds - everything from finding a spot to do it, setting up equipment, getting decent shots, post processing images, etc.
2. If you do try astrophotography, join a club so you don't have to learn everything on your own. Start on a small scale. The Celestron 9.25" EDGEHD is way too much for a beginner.
3. If you do try astrophotography, have low expectations for your results. I have a friend who has been doing astrophotography for many years and has several telescopes, mounts, dedicated cameras, etc. Not to belittle his work, but all his efforts and equipment have not produced anything that I would even post on this site. Astrophotography is very difficult.
Bruce Sherman
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