Richard Bamfield Photography
Astrophotography
Milky Way
I still remember taking my first milky way photo. The faint band in the sky turns into a river of stars in the LCD screen of your camera.
Deep Sky Objects
So after shooting the milky way the next step is to attempt to photograph Deep Sky Objects; galaxies and Nebulae. Without a mount that can track the stars with the rotation of the earth this is next to impossible. So I bought myself a Star Guider Pro tracking mount and the fun began. You mount your camera to it and align it with the southern celestial pole and now with a big lens (e.g 400mm) instead of only being able to take 1s exposures before you see star trails you can take 2minutes ones. I've separated the images below into ones taken with my camera as opposed to a telescope on a telescope mount.
DSO with Camera and Tracking Mount
The next step after a camera and tracking mount is a full blown telescope with an equatorial mount. The learning curve to get good photos is enormous compared with everything prior to this.
DSO with Telescope, HEQ5 Equatorial Mount
Planets
Last but not least are the planets. In some ways these are easier to photograph than DSOs, as they are so bright that you only need sub-second exposure times, so you don't have top worry about accurate tracking. But the problem is the earth's atmosphere, it causes the planet's features to look blurred. The key to getting good planetary photos is to take video, then stack 1000's of video frames and select the best ones to use. There's a free program called AutoStakkert to to this. The main problem is trying to find a compatible video format that it can read. The image of Jupiter on the left is a single frame, the image of Saturn is many 100's of stacked video frames. I've still got a lot of work to do to master this.
Comets
