Posts

An Introduction to Landscape Astrophotography (Capturing the Milky Way, Planets and more)

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Landscape photography of the night sky is the most straightforward type of astrophotography. In this article I am going to explain how to get started in it. In recent years, advances in mobile phone technology have made astrophotography increasingly accessible to the amateur.

How to Create Star Trails the Easy Way and with Free Software!

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In this article I would like to talk about one of the simplest forms of astrophotography but also one of the most beautiful, star trails.

Chasing Dark Skies on Dartmoor (Capturing the Milky Way and More under Pristine Skies)

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In this article for the first time, I am chasing dark skies by doing astronomy in the wild, this allows you to see things that are not just possible to see from urban areas. So hopefully this article will inspire you to do the same. In today's world, seeing the night sky is increasingly difficult. Light pollution has been slowly getting worse reducing what we can see in the sky. In London where I am usually based the sky is orange and only the brightest stars are usually visible with the naked eye. So, I really need to go off the grid to find somewhere that is remote enough to be dark. In a country like the UK, where the cities and towns are quite close together, it will take quite some time to escape the light pollution. To do this I decided to go to the Dartmoor national park, in the south west of England. As far as Dartmoor is concerned, I decided to explore the northern section, as it would be dark since there are no other settlements nearby and the Exmoor national park is als...

Three Good Reasons to Use an Autoguider in Astrophotography

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On my YouTube Channel I take a lot of astrophotography photos to show you what you can see in the nights sky, unfortunately though they are not always perfect and this is because the mount does not always track accurately and to get around this I have gone and got myself a guide scope. In this article, I would like to list three good reasons why a guide scope would be useful in astrophotography. The first and most obvious reason you would want to get a guide scope is obviously to guide and PHD2 a free open-source software makes and excellent job of this, especially when used with my Astroberry . If you would like to see an example of the PHD2 in action then please watch the episode below. In the episode below I show a side-by-side comparison of the M65 galaxy, comparing tracking and non-tracking images. Although the guided footage is clearly better than the unguided, I would like to point out that both captures have the same exposure and so on, it is just that guided footage i...