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Hello Everyone! I just started astrophotography, literally a few weeks in into November last year. What happened is, my daughter asked for a telescope for Christmas, and I picked her a Celestron 70AZ. Meanwhile I was also testing out a feature on my Pixel 4a phone, which claims to have "astrophotography" if I put it on a tripod. I got a very nice image out of the phone, but of course that's no match to a DSLR or dedicated astro camera. So, my wife and I agreed not to buy each other gifts, instead let both of us buy ourselves whatever we desire. That of course triggered me to spend all my money! LOL! So I ended up getting a Pentax K-70, which is an awesome camera and has astrophotography features with its very good noise handling and low light photography. The camera is almost ISO independent and actually it's better to stick to low ISO, even at short exposures. I bought an extra GPS tracker unit for it, which helps to change the camera anti shake- shift-sensor to track the stars - claimed to be up to 3-4 minutes without needing a star tracker, by simply shifting the sensor inside the camera. Unfortunately that didn't work for me, since I got some serious magnetic interference and all the GPS signals are thrown off around my property (not sure why) , as of I have already noticed with my car GPS previously . That lead me to go out and get a tiny scope (W.O. Z61) and then go for a big-heavy mount that I can build on later if I wanted to, so I got a EQ-6RPro mount. The tiny scope looks a bit silly on the heavy mount, but as I noticed, my guide scope is almost not needed at all below 4 minutes of exposures. I also don't plan to keep only one scope of course, I'm planning to get something else later during this year, something with higher magnification for galaxies and planets, so I'm thinking of a S-Cassegrain or maybe a Newtonian. I'm still missing a field flattener so I had to crop in quite into the images, due to elongated stars at the edges. The reason I don't have one yet, due to online stores simply ran out in USA just around and after Christmas and some other sites started to charge extra and shipping time was just bad. Its on its way though, finally! Also my Pentax K-70- while it can make excellent pictures at night - lacks any software support for remote operation from my PC so I ended up buying a cheap/used Canon 60D off Ebay, and should be good for now until I decide whether to get a dedicated RGB camera or another DSLR. So anyway, I guess I spent too much money (haha) during this Christmas, but a thoroughly enjoying making pictures of the night sky, but I have a very very long way to go. |
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Here are our top picks for the best telescopes under 300 dollars. These include best professional telescopes along with the best ones for beginners. |
