USB-C is becoming an industry standard in astrophotography as it can use fewer cables by sharing power and data. However, some components need higher voltages through that USB-C cable. If you plug a 12V cable into a component that needs 5V you can cause damage. Please be careful!
Getting deep images of the Milky Way can take a lot of power from your DSLR’s battery. Using a dummy battery to power your camera means you can leave it running all night and you won’t have to change batteries. You power the dummy battery with a PegasusAstro DSLR Buddy, and that means you can also run a dew heater strap from the mains, or a big battery.
An infinity corrected objective is a lens used for macrophotography. It looks very much like a microscope lens, and when you pair it with a tube lens it has quite a few advantages over more traditional macro lenses.
With the Australian Solar eclipse coming in 2028, it’s time to get familiar with solar telescopes. With Lunt telescopes you can see the surface of the Sun using white light, or Hydrogen alpha and Calcium-K filters. These all show different aspects of what’s happening there. If you want to photograph it as well, there are cameras for that too.
Bill used the Benro Polaris tracking mount to get images of comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. This post tells the story of the expedition. He also reviews the Polaris.
There are lots of different adapters available for all sorts of different jobs. PegasusAstro adapters have a consistent way of defining what’s on either ends, so you don’t end up scratching your head.
Saturn’s 2024 opposition will be on 8 September. Around that time, its rings will appear to glow brighter than usual due to retroreflectivity. Soon afterwards, however, the rings will be edge-on and become entirely invisible.
Getting a good truss system together is hard. The carbon fibre rods have to be held rigidly, but they also have to be able to change the angle they’re sitting at. These truss blocks and ball joints do all that.
Macrophotography is the art of getting images of tiny subjects onto a camera sensor. I’ve been asked about getting started in macrophotography, and specifically the least expensive way of getting your first image with the WeMacro Rail. This blog shows you how to go out and get your first image, so I’m going to get down to basics.
Sampling rates can make your stars good or blocky, especially if you zoom in. It all depends on a few factors like your focal length, the size of the pixels in your sensor, how good the atmospheric conditions are, and even how good your guiding is. This article shows how to get a combination of telescope and camera that will give you nice smooth stars under a range of conditions.
This is an instalment of a tutorial series on how to slave a dome. In this part we look at connecting the dome control software to the dome and mount through the ASCOM Hub. Depending on the connections you can perform the slaving calculations in the dome control software or the ASCOM Hub.
In this second part of the dome slaving series, we discuss connecting your observatory control program directly to the dome and the mount using ASCOM drivers. This is the simplest we to set it up, and allows you to use the observatory control program to do the slaving calculations.
