Typical 2008 Imaging Setup. Equipment Info Here.
It's fairly easy to get decent shots of the moon through any telescope that you can attach a camera to. But long exposure deep space shots require equipment, plus a lot of study and practice using the equipment effectively
I started astrophotography back when film was king, and shot film while I was learning to produce decent images. Digital cameras really help you shorten the learning curve, because you can see right away if there are any problems with your tracking, exposure settings, etc.
My digital astrophotography began with an Olympus Digicam, followed by a Nikon D100 (see D100 Images) in mid August, 2003. Even though the D100 had noise problems, it was amazing how fast it could capture photons compared with film. As of 10/28/2005, I began shooting with a Canon EOS 20Da, a camera designed for astrophotography. The key modification is a more permissive IR filter that passes the very common deep red light found in Nebula. I sometimes use a Nikon D200 DSLR for short astronomy exposures, as it has far better noise characteristics than did the D100. I still shoot star trails with film these days, but that's about it. Finally, in late 2008 I acquired a cooled CCD camera, a QHY8.
This rest of this page covers astrophotography basics, with some discussion of both film and digital imaging.
I shoot tripod camera lens astronomy pictures, but this gets limiting in a hurry. I also shoot with the camera directly mounted to the telescope (called "prime focus")
Equipment: It almost goes without saying that you need at least a sturdy tripod when shooting star trails or meteors, as well as with "piggy back" or "wide field" astrophotography (where you are shooting with a camera and a normal lens attached to a mount that tracks the movement of the skies).
Take a camera, mount it on a tripod, aim it at the sky. A normal (50mm equivalent) lens is good for a start. For constellations, use the camera's self timer or a cable release, take a picture for 8 seconds to 1 minute. For star trails, take a picture for 1 minute to 1 hour. (Note, with a DSLR you probably won't want go more than 5 or 10 minutes depending on the camera). Shooting really long exposure star trails is still easiest with film. If all you want is star trails, you can use slow film like Velvia. Here's a 2 hr. job on 100 film; details on the page: "Sky glow" has to be accounted for in your film speed & aperture calculations. You don't need a fast lens, BTW. From suburban skies, try 5 minutes on 100 film at f4 as a start, and experiment. Note: It is also possible to do star trails with a DSLR, stitching together multiple short exposures. Long exposures (>20 minutes) on most DSLRS will result in too much noise. See examples of stars and planets from a tripod here. A new "Fixed Tripod Astronomy Pictures" page is here.
Telescope & Milky Way, fixed tripod, ~30 second exposure at f1.4, 50mm lens
With regards to shooting meteors, there is a very specific technique where you expose for about 5 minutes on 800 (or any fast) film or ISO setting with a normal lens at f2.8 or so. You point at the part of the sky where there's likely to be the most activity, or perhaps frame a familiar constellation as my friend did. See pix, links, discussion: I've not done this the above with a digital camera; but, due to the shorter exposure (3-7 min), it will work better than star trails (1 minute to all night) *very* long exposures.
Shooting the moon through a telescope is easy. You shoot with a fast enough shutter speed that it's usually not critical to track the sky. 
See example moon shots from a tripod here.
Prime Focus Astrophotography - Shooting from a mount that tracks the sky's movement
Prime focus astrophotography (using a telescope such as my Takahashi TOA 130 as a camera lens) is very difficult and takes quite a while to master (except for moon shots). You need a sturdy mount for the long-exposure shots which combine into the images you see on my site. My trusty Losmandy G11 mount has recently been replaced by an Astro-Physics AP 900GTO mount. The newer mount can handle more weight, track more accurately, and hold up better in the wind. And it has "goto" object location, which is very nice and makes it much easier to find some of the dimmer objects. The mount is controlled by my astronomy software (The Sky) making it easy to precisely frame objects with the computer controlling the telescope. A goto mount is especially nice because I no longer need to crawl under the camera to locate an object straight up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning when the temperature is below freezing. Before moving to the QHY8 CCD Camera I still did that from time to time to fine tune object framing, though.
See me and my scope/mount setup here: (bottom of page) and here: Scope Setup (this shows a camera and a film lens attached to a telescope mount.) For long exposure astrophotographs a sturdy mount is in order. Here's a link with one of my better wide field shots
DSLRs are now a preferred way to take pictures of the night sky. The Canon 10D and related cameras were king of D-SLR astrophotography due to long-exposure noise characteristics. The Canon EOS 20Da became king in 2006 due to it's modified filter. There are also a few outfits that take normal cameras and modify them for astrophotography. There are still some reasons to prefer film for astrophotography, cost being a primary factor. See my discussion here: Why Film Astrophotography?
One other point is that what people do with digital cameras is to take a large number of pictures that individually are under exposed, and then digitally combine them. Combining multiple images is required to create good pix of planets.
Most astro images benefit from extensive digital image manipulation as described here Photoshop Basics
Old Film Info: Film choice here is very important, because some films are very poor performers. Now Kodak E200 slide film is the best, while for print films Fuju SHQ 200 (sold only at discount and drug stores in 2008) is the best print film.
There there are a couple of newsgroups relevant to this topic, the astro-photo@seds.org and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital_astro/
-Dick L.
p.s. Books: Covington's Astrophotography for the Amateur and Reeves' Wide-Field Astrophotography are indispensable. Wodaski's "New CCD Astronomy" book is also excellent.
Copyright © 2004-2009 Dick Locke. All Rights Reserved.
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