Beginning astrophotography part 1: basic types of AP
This is an image of Messier Object 51 (aka M51) the Whirlpool Galaxy taken from my back yard outside of Houston, Texas. While I captured the data for this image, I have to admit that I didn't do the processing myself, I had help from a friend on Reddit r/telescopes. Ok, so I regularly have discussions with people concerning what kind of equipment to get to get started in astrophotography (AP). This is a really, really tough topic, because AP isn't just a single, monolithic subject. There are several types of AP, and each has its own particular needs as far as equipment and technique. I'm going to try to tackle some of this in several posts. Let me first break this down by starting to distinguish between different types of AP. This can basically be broken into four categories based on field of view and exposure. By field of view, I mean the size of the patch of sky we are trying to image. This isn't quite the same as, but is somewhat analo
