![]() If you're not sure what your sensor size is, this website should tell you. You'll want to make sure you input your focal length and sensor size in the appropriate boxes. Once you get to the Telescope Simulator page you can select any object you plan on photographing. Now you can quickly see how an object will look with any give combination of camera and lens! Once I started using an auto-guider though, I could easily shoot 2+ minutes with sharp stars! For more information on auto-guider, check out my article here.Īs I was doing research for this article, I learned about a great resource - This website allows you to input your focal length and sensor size to get an accurate view of how large the objects will appear. Most notably, there's an ugly purple glow at the bottom of my photos. Even if I took 100 photos and stacked them, I would still have problems baked into the final image. ![]() This was never enough time to capture the light that I needed. Of course, this largely depends on your polar alignment accuracy, balance, the tracker itself, and whether you have an auto-guider.īefore I purchased an auto-guider, I was limited to 30 second exposures with my Tamron 150-600mm lens. Instead of shooting 2 minute exposures at 250mm, you will be lucky to get sharp stars at 30 seconds when shooting 400mm+. ![]() The more zoom you have, the more accurate your tracking has to be. However, there is a drawback to consider. As the zoom in further, and the objects get larger in the frame, you will be able to pull out more details. Once you get to 400mm, you should be able to fill most of the frame with these objects. For a full list, check out my Deep Space Course, which focuses on 12 different objects. Let's be clear, when I say deep space objects I'm referring to the brightest and largest objects in the night sky. I personally like shooting between 400mm - 600mm for most of the deep space objects. The Andromeda Galaxy is also one of the largest objects in the night sky. I then scaled it to show the galaxy would look at these various focal lengths. The original photo was taken at 500mm and edited in Photoshop. This comparison shows the Andromeda Galaxy at 150mm, 200mm, 300mm, 400mm, 500mm, and 600mm. However, if you've got a high-res sensor like the Nikon D850, you can crop in quite close and still retain a lot of detail. If you have a lower-resolution sensor, this crop will cause problems with the image quality. You will need to crop in quite considerably to get a great photo. At this focal length, even the largest objects (like the Andromeda Galaxy) will be fairly small in the frame. Now that I've photographed most of the large objects in the night sky with a variety of lenses, I've got a pretty good idea of how the focal length will change the composition. We'll cover crop-sensors, and how they affect focal length, later on. ![]() For the rest of this section, I will be focusing on focal lengths with a Full Frame camera, like the Canon 5D or Nikon D850. Thankfully, I've got plenty of sample images to give you an idea of how the different objects will look. This can be hard to quantify when it comes to deep space astrophotography though. More focal length means more zoom, and any objects you are photographing will appear larger in the frame. Let's start off with focal length, since this is the easiest to understand. Of all the images I've taken, this is still one of my favorites! I used a Tokina 100mm Macro lens, Nikon D750, and an iOptron SkyTracker Pro to take a single 60 second photo. As you'll learn though, focal length is just the tip of the iceberg! In this article I will break down all the major points, and simplify things as much as possible. Pairing a Camera and Lens / Telescope for AstrophotographyĪstrophotography is a fairly complicated hobby, and there's a lot to learn! One of the most important aspects of astrophotography is picking the correct camera for your lens or telescope (and vice versa!) For all my fellow photographers out there, we are very familiar with focal length, and how that affects our images.
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