Astrophotography: Attempt 1

I was getting excited.   I now had a telescope and I had a Nikon D90 DSLR camera.  Hooking the camera to the telescope, pointing the scope towards the sky, and taking an awesome pictures should be easy.  I was about to find out that astrophotography is not easy at all.    The biggest challenge is the stars do not stay stationary in the sky.   Everything is moving or rotating in space including the Earth, the moon, and even the galaxies themselves.    Astrophotography requires long exposures in order to capture all of that light from an object light years away.  If you keep your camera pointed on a star for too long then the camera will actually capture the star's change in position.  Instead of  a pin point star, the star will be a line of light.  This is called a star trail and is not something we want to see when trying to image a deep sky object.

Special mounts are available to compensate for the movement where essentially the camera and telescope moves exactly as the stars do in the sky.  When I attempted my first photo, I just had a simple aluminum tripod mount.  Since I didn't have a fancy mount, my only other solution was to take a LOT of short exposures object.  Short exposures are not long enough to show any star's change in position and would keep the star trails away.

I decided I was going to see if I could at least get some kind of picture with my simple set-up.  I found the constellation Cassiopeia.  Constellations are like landmarks in the sky to help find other objects in the sky.  Cassiopeia points right to Andromeda, the closest galaxy to the Milky Way.   It is big and I was hoping for my first picture of it no matter how bad that might be.

http://earthsky.org/tonight/cassiopeia-the-queen-also-points-to-andromeda-galaxy

I found the smudge of light in the eyepiece of the telescope that was Andromeda and then started taking one second exposures.   A short exposure is not the best way to get a good image.  The longer the exposure, the stronger the signal and the stronger the signal the better detail you will get.   I knew one second exposures was not great but I was going to take a bunch of them and see what happened.  Since the galaxy was moving in the sky I had to constantly keep centering the image in the camera and taking a new exposure.  I took 300 one second exposure pictures and loaded them up on the computer to see what I would see..

I took all 300 photos and stacked them to get my first ever picture of an object in space.  It was pretty bad actually, but I was excited.  It showed me that I had a lot of learning and work to do, but I was hooked on exploring the beauty that we cannot see without a camera hooked to a telescope.

A poor attempt at imaging Andromeda galaxy