Astrophotography
“The universe is full of signals we have not yet learned to read.”
—— Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Equipment, Setup and usual Process
I have an almost negligible budget, so my equipment is all second-hand and definitely not designed for astrophotography. It is, however, good enough to catch some deep-sky photons and reveal the wonderful structures that hide in our skies.
I use an unmodified Nikkon D5300 DSLR camera with a 200mm f/5.6 lens mounted on an altazimuth mount. I do not own either a tracker or an actual telescope. The only reason I haven’t modified the camera (removing UV/IR filters or the bayer matrix or adding cooling) is because I cannot afford a second camera shall I break this one :) .
In terms of software, I use KStars for session planning and Ekos (which is included with KStars) for camera control. I’ve used both Siril and PixInsight (trial license) for image processing. My knowledge of the subject is not yet good enough to be able to recommend one over the other, so I’ll just say that both will happily output decent images.