Astrophotography

The first Technical Series meeting of the 2019-2020 season took place on September 24. BCA member Doug Paul gave a presentation on astrophotography, a pursuit that he took up in earnest upon his retirement. He shared a wide variety of images followed by a detailed description of the equipment, methods, and software he uses to capture his gorgeous images of Deep Space Objects. Doug had the session videotaped and you can watch it in full at this link. On that YouTube page there is more explanation and a table of contents with time codes pointing to the sections of the video .

Doug also supplied a list of references. These are all active links to resources you can access on the web.

• A link to the meeting video again

• Fixed mount Astrophotography with a Camera and Lens

• Getting Started with Astrophotography

• (Rediscover) Astrophotography - Next Steps

• Deep Sky Astrophotography

• Deep Sky Astrophotography (Gear Discussion)

• Nightscape Photography with Digital Cameras

• Colors of Stars

• Stacking and ISO

• Photons to Photos (Camera info)

• Dragonfly Telescope (telescope made from multiple Canon 400mm f/2.8 lenses)

  • link 1

  • link 2

  • link 3

• Astrophotography Forums

• Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, (ATMoB)

• Software

  • Software for Astrophotographers

  • Stellarium (Digital Planetarium)

  • Gphoto2 (camera access and control software)

  • PHD2 (autoguider software)

  • Instrument Neutral Distributed Interface (INDI)

  • Dcraw/LibRaw (decoding raw files)

    • link 1

    • link 2

  • Regim (astro pre-processing)

  • Exiftool (reads and writes EXIF data)

  • RawTherapee (image editor)

  • ImageMagick (image format conversion, editing, and display)

• Hardware

  • Sky Watcher Star Adventurer (simple motorized equatorial mount)