I travel and I camp quite a lot. And I love astrophotography. How can you mix these two? Some time ago, I was using a traditional German equatorial mount, a guidescope and a laptop for astrophotography. The mount was around 18 kilos, tripod included, the guidescope around 2 and the laptop added another 1.5 kg to the setup. This was without my camera and imaging telescope or camera lenses. Oh, and let’s not forget the heavy 12V battery. And the cables. Lots of cables and adapters. Then, I decided to switch to a lighter setup more suitable to by style of astrophotography. I usually do astrophotography at short focal lengths, the longest being 500mm. Now, most of my astrophotography is done with a star tracker on a tripod, one camera body, two lenses, one telescope and one Macbook Pro for post processing. And a portable power pack. For the tracker, I chose the Fornax LighTrack II. Yes, there are lighter trackers out there, but I agreed to trade some weight for tracking accuracy. The LighTrack II is for sure the most accurate star tracker available on the market today. The peak-to-peak unguided tracking error of the LighTrack is around 2 arcseconds, […]
I took my first astrophoto around twenty years ago. With a Smena 5 camera and a 40mm f/5.6 lens – a camera not very well suited for astrophotography. Then, things got better. I had a Zenit and a Praktica, but I settled for an Olympus OM-1, probably the best 35mm film camera for astrophotography. My parents bought me a 50mm f/1.4 lens; I was hoping for an f/1.2, but it was too expensive for their budget. I used the OM-1 for many years and I fell in love with it and its range of lenses. Some more years passed, and film cameras were surpassed in performance by digital technology. As, outside my astrophotography, I was shooting with a Canon SLR. it made sense for me to choose Canon DSLR as my main camera. Being a professional photographer, I used almost all top lenses out there, no matter the manufacturer. Of course, I was using the same lenses for my astrophotography. And then, I had a problem. My expensive lenses, which allowed enough detail to print wall sized advertising photos, were not exceptional for astrophotography. What was wrong? When I was shooting wide open (and you need that in astrophotography from […]
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