Decided to attempt some astrophotography to expand my photography hobby. You don’t need a lot of fancy gear and (but it helps) and you can get quite a bit with just a DSLR or mirrorless camera with regular lenses although there are a few things to overcome.

To get good, reasonably noise free shots, you need to do long exposures and many of them and then stack the resulting images together to reduce the noise. Pretty much any decent DSLR or mirrorless camera can do that. The problem with that is the apparently motion of the stars since the Earth rotates. You can get sharp stars with short exposures but you will miss a lot of detail. Long exposures are possible with the camera but you start to get star trails from the motion of the stars. To counter this, a star tracker helps by moving the camera to match the apparent motion of the stars.

I had the camera (Canon EOS R6mkII), lenses and a tripod necessary and after watching several reviews on YouTube, settled on an iOptron SkyGuider Pro star tracker. Here’s this first attempt’s kit:

I decided to not do the easy thing and shoot any of the nebulas in Orion first thing but to shoot Andromeda instead. A bit more of a challenge to find and get things set up for without fancy automated camera or telescope mounts you can tell what you want to see and they’ll point the camera at it.

I took the gear out and did my first polar alignment. It wasn’t great and that had its impact. Andromeda, slowly drifted across the field of view. Along with that mistake, my exposure time was set at 60 seconds, and I controlled it with my trust old intervalometer I have had for ages. Turns out 60 seconds at 200mm is a problem with just a star tracker alone without autoguiding to assist and that wasn’t helped by the poor polar alignment.

Still, I managed to get 55 reasonably useable shots I could then stack. Most of them looks something like this one:

Not great and lots of light pollution, noise and motion blur but usable.

I tried stacking them both in DeepSkyTracker and Sequator and found the Sequator stack was a better starting point. I then imported them into Lightroom and Photoshop to begin post processing using a variety of YouTube videos as guides. The first result wasn’t too bad.

Not too bad but there isn’t a lot of detail and the starts are too blurry.

After this first attempt, I looked at some PixInsight tutorials and decided to try to edit things there. I opened the Sequator stack and followed along with Peter Zelinka’s tutorial. The result was MUCH better and that tool allowed me to fix a lot of the problems with the stars the poor polar alignment and overly long exposure caused:

All in all, a pretty successful first attempt at astrophotography. I discovered the importance of a good polar alignment and not over taxing the star tracker by itself with overly long exposures for the focal length in use. Decide to get a kit for autoguiding and until that came in, I’d use a shorter exposure time and shorter focal length.