Thanks everyone.
I am pretty new to astrophotography, I've only been in it a couple months, so I have a lot to learn still.
Here's is a shot of my setup. It is all run from my laptop and once set up, is automatic.
Astrophotography Setup by
Andrew Marjama, on Flickr
That little red circular thing is a guide camera. That camera, along with a program called PHD2, guides the mount, correcting it every second so that the mount tracks with sub-pixel accuracy. Meaning I can image for as long as I want and a pinpoint star will not move more than .5 pixels or so during a whole 4 hour imaging session. It is hard to believe the amount of precision available today for very little money.
Once I find an object I'd like to shoot for the night, I use a program called Astro Photography Tool and Selarium (a free planetarium program), to point the telescope and to control the camera.
After a session, I have around 3-4 hours of separate images, usually of around 5 minute exposures. These separate exposures I have to "Stack" in a stacking program. There is a free stacking program called "Deep Sky Stacker, but I use a program called "Astro Pixel Processor". This stacking program first analyses each image and maps out the stars, it then registers each image and finally stacks each image, aligning each star and adjusting each image for rotation.
Stacking builds detail while taking away noise. The more images you stack, the deeper, clearer and more detailed a deep sky image gets.
For example, this is a single 300 second frame from the Andromeda image above. As you can see, there isn't a whole lot there. BUT, take 30-40 of these images, run them through the stacking program, and like magic, you get a very usable image.
Andromeda single 300 sec frame by
Andrew Marjama, on Flickr
And here is the image you get after stacking. This is before post processing the image in Photoshop
Andromeda_1-1-19_190_min stacked by
Andrew Marjama, on Flickr
So far this astrophotography has really been addicting! Seeing these images start to pop up on the screen, running them through the stacking program and processing them is a huge amount of fun. I am blown away that I am able to capture what I am capturing. I really didn't think it would be as easy as it is, and as fun.
Cloudy nights are now my nemesis