Astrophotography is a huge and complex field to get into, but it's very addictive once you get started. First off, go browse around www.cloudynights.com . Those guys are extremely helpful and tolerant of n00bs so don't be afraid to ask anything over there.

I have a Meade LXD75 with an 8" Shmidt-Newtonian Reflector scope, and I connect my Rebel to it using a 2" barrel mount that locks into the camera body just like a lens would. The 2" barrel simply slides into the telescope focuser where an eyepiece would usually go, and then the telescope simply becomes a huge camera lens. This is called afocal astrophotography.

The other possibility is to get a t-mount for your camera that will attach the camera to a telescope eyepiece. The advantage is you can get much higher magnification, but the drawback is extra weight and lots more glass in the image train. More weight means it's increasingly difficult to suppress vibrations and the mount has to work harder to follow the sky. Extra glass means a decrease in images quality and increased exposure times, since every glass/air interface you average an 8-10% loss in light throughput due to reflection. This method is called projection astrophotography, and is not ideal for a DSLR. There are cheaper cameras out there specifically built to shoot at higher magnifications that do much better that a DSLR.

DSLRs excel at wide-field, long exposures of faint objects. You can even modify them by removing the infrared cut filter so they pick up the faint red wavelength of hydrogen-alpha. They also work well on the moon and sun (with a proper filter of course). They are not ideal for planets. Planets require 1000's of individual exposures at high magnification that get stacked together to pull out the faintest details. There are webcams and other cameras that recored avi's that are best suited for planets.

You could also get a telescope and sit your camera on top, piggyback, with a fast and wide lens. This lets the telescope track the sky while your camera operates as you're used to. Lots of guys use this method to get hour+ long exposures of the Milky Way, or vast nebulas that are too large to fit in the field of view of a telescope.

This is my imaging rig:




I run everything from my laptop. I have Starry Nights to control the scope and I use DSLR Focus to help focus the camera/scope combination. I also have countless other programs to stack images, process tiffs, help align the scope, and a few others that I can't even remember what they do. Like I said, it's addictive.

Go to http://www.telescope.com/ and http://www.astronomics.com/ to browse at their telescope selections. You can't go wrong with either an Orion or a Meade. And yes, the eyepieces are rather expensive, but the same theory goes in camera lenses, good optics are not cheap.

I could go on and on, but go browse those sites for a few days and holler with questions.

Oh, and you can see some of my astrophotography here: http://tardypizza.com/gallery2/v/Astrophotography/

I've got a 700m also I love that thing.

By the way, what show did you see that inspired you?

I recently thought about getting into some astrophotography. I researched it a little, and was a bit overwhelmed by all the "extra" stuff you need in addition to normal observing gear.

I don't have a nice scope yet, but I think the wife is going to get me an 8" Dob I've requested for Christmas. If I decide I like it, I at least have an upgrade path by buying a better mount. I just figure I should learn how to find a lot of these things before I try to image them.

Originally Posted by Sephro

It was a special on channel 2 called "Seeing in the Dark"
http://www.pbs.org/seeinginthedark/

Cool! I'm glad someone caught it. Sometimes, it's like I'm talking to myself around here:

http://www.newschoolofphotography.co...hp?topic=331.0