Starting Out: Equipment

Gearing Up for Learning

As one of my mentors likes to tell beginners, there’s a difference between the best gear for learning this craft and that for producing astrophotographs. Mind you, my “learning” rig has produced some of my best images and is still very much in use. Other nights I use longer scopes, a fancier imaging train, and more gadgetry. But when you’re starting out, simple is better.

Milky Way and Night Landscapes

For landscapes and Milky Way imaging, a cell phone with a “pro” mode that can produce RAW images is a great start, especially if you have a way to hold it steady (tripod, suction cup, beanbag). A camera with a fast-aperture lens (f/2.8 or better) is great; interchangeable lenses are better, and a fixed-focal-length lens (i.e. “prime”) is best. Megapixels, so touted on bullet lists, are much less important than noise performance, which is related to pixel size. Think “bigger sensor with fewer pixels”. My ancient 14-MP Pentax K-5iis has whacking huge 4.76𝛍 pixels that really squash the noise. Almost all of my “Landscape” gallery was shot with that or my even older K-7. Automation, bah! Autofocus and autoexposure almost never work for astro. So simpler, older lenses work quite well (most of mine are from the 1980s).

Smart Telescopes

All-in-one automated telescope/camera units such as the ZWO SeeStar S50 or the Dwarf Labs scopes are amazing — for a few hundred dollars, they can distill the whole experience to (1) Put unit on tripod (2) Use app (3) Collect amazing photos. Their capabilities are limited compared to traditional setups, true, but a lot of people will never get to those limits. You can spend more and do worse.

“Traditional” Deep Sky

Most targets demand some kind of tracking mount that can compensate for the Earth’s rotation. Here is where many beginners go astray. They’re ensorceled by telescope specs, thinking that they need a big lens/mirror on a telescope with lots of magnification. When you’re learning, that’s exactly wrong. Bigger just means “harder to debug”.

What’s critically important is the mount. Don’t buy a telescope, buy a mount and then choose optics to put on it. “I started with too big a telescope” is a common admission. but “too good a mount” — never. (Too heavy, yes. Too good, no.) My cell phone home screen is a deep-sky image I produced with my 11-year-old DSLR and a forty-year-old 50mm macro lens…riding on a $2500 mount!

Examples here are from one manufacturer’s product line. That’s just for simplicity, they’re hardly the only fish in the pond.

For a camera and lens, or a mini refractor telescope, a star tracker such as the iOptron SkyTracker will do the job for under $600. The next jump up is a small equatorial mount with GOTO, or the ability to slew right to your target. You can put a longer scope on it, and take longer exposures. Ones like the CEM26 that can support up to, say, a 3” refractor and camera will set you back at least a grand. If you have a bit more to spend, consider one of the newer strain-wave mounts, which are very light for their capacity and simpler to set up. Finally, if you’re rolling in the dough (or, like me, in the grip of madness), a higher-capacity mount like the CEM70 is very rewarding to work with. Note that most of these prices don’t include tripods, and an astro mount needs a really beefy one. I’ve tried my CEM25P on my camera tripod and it just laughed. Then it fell over.

As for a telescope, a small refractor (50-80mm diameter lens) is the smart choice. Light, simple, robust, very little that can go wrong with it. Bigger or more complex scopes just make debugging more complicated. Sorry, there will be debugging. Remember, I warned you.

Planets

You know all that advice I just gave about deep-sky gear? Yeah, throw that away. Planets are very tiny targets but they’re brilliantly lit, standing the deep-sky challenge on its head. For planets you need a big scope (bigger objective lens/mirror means more resolvable detail), a lot of magnification, and a camera with small pixels that can shoot video at high frame rates (up to 150 FPS). Here, just buying a computerized scope is great.