How I got into Astrophotography part 2/3

How I got into Astrophotography part 2/3

After the successful Andromeda shot I was full of enthusiasm but I quickly realized that I have very limited number of targets. The exposure time I could do before stars started to trail was very small and nothing but the brightest objects would be visible. Then winter came and with it another wonderful target, the Orion.

M42 The Orion nebula

 This image was taken exactly same way as the Andromeda but this version is re-edited after year of experience. The first version of this was much worse and black and white since I didn't know how to stretch histogram and how to play with color channel. Also this one was taken from the window of my flat.

In the spring 2017 I've decided to buy better telescope. This time I wanted something better, something I can mount my DLSR to, something with features like GoTo and object tracking. After long time picking one I got my Celestron Nexstar 127 SLT. Looking back this wasn't the best choice either but it did the job and it still does it though not so often.

In the beginning I was really sad with my choice because it runs on 8 AAA batteries and most of the time it would die in the middle of the alignment process. This was really limiting factor and it was starting to be expensive, every night would cost me 8 or even 16 batteries. Power cord that I had to buy separately solved everything. Now I can use it as long as I want.

I was too optimistic about the tracking too. I thought that I could do few minute exposures with this kind of mount (motorized AZ) truth is that when I align it as perfectly as I can, I can do around 30s max.

Then I saw an article about guiding and realized that this should be my next goal (still is btw). For guiding I needed better mount, another telescope and camera. The camera was the first thing I got out of those three since Jupiter and Saturn were visible and I wanted to do some planetary imaging.

Me using the ZWO ASI178MC for the first time

I was satisfied with this gear for about 4 months. I was taking planetary pictures and shoot the Moon but the guiding was still my goal. The thing about astrophotography is that everything is expensive and I realized that if I wanna continue improving the quality of my pictures, improving my technique won't be enough and I'll need to get better mount but the kind I wanted was out of my price range. 

Luckily I started being active on Czech astronomy forum and started watching the sale/swap section there. After about 5 weeks there was an offer that suited my need and after one long trip across the whole county (sounds bad but Czech is small) I had my Celestron CG5 Advanced GT