CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: Aspiring photographers-- Something to think about

"Spending a lot of money on hi-tech equipment also makes it much easier to screw up."

I don't agree. From my perspective the exact opposite is true. The trick in astrophotography primarily has to do with eliminating tracking errors.

There are three components that are involved, the mount, the guider and the accuracy of the alignment.

The accuracy of the alignment comes with experience. To a certain extent it can be made easier with "high tech" tools like a good polar alignment scope but the main ingredient is still skill and experience. Understanding drift correction, OTA balance, even picking the right terrain to place the mount. The better the alignment, the better the tracking and the less errors that will be introduced. All this is experience based.

Often beginners that are starting on the astrophotography learning curve lack alignment experience and introduce tracking errors. The more error introduced, the more corrections that will need to be carried out by the mount and guider.

As far mounts go, low end mounts cost less because they don't track as well. In other words they have a higher probability of tracking errors because they are simply made cheaper and lack "high tech" refinements like periodic error correction.

If a low end mount like the CG-5 is polar aligned well, it's inherent shortcomings are minimized. If it is not aligned well then those shortcomings manifest themselves and are magnified. A case in point, with "perfect" polar alignment, in theory, no declination corrections need to be made. The CG-5 has horrible declination backlash and very unbalanced response to guider inputs, (at least mine did). So if polar alignment is off the errors are much more magnified and difficult to correct that with a "high tech" mount.

The same is true of guiders. Low end guiders are much harder to work with than "high tech" equipment. Low end guiders need brighter stars or longer exposure times to reliably guide.

A case in point is the Meade 201XT and SBIG's STV. These two stand alone guiders are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. One is "low end" and the other "high tech". I've had both and can say that both are capable of guiding. The STV is practically effortless where the "low end" 102XT was far more complicated, unreliable and much easier to "screw up".

The longer a guider needs to do an exposure means the longer the mount has to track unassisted between corrections. A "high tech" guider will feed corrections more frequently and the results will be better tracking. But a combination of a low end guider and low end mount translates to quite a bit of accumulated errors that can only be minimized by a good polar alignment.

So my thoughts are that it actually takes a high amount of skill and experience to be able to take good images using low end equipment.

Most beginners tend to start out with low end equipment which to me would make the task of building their skillset a lot more difficult.

My thought is that there is a fairly steep learning curve to do astrophotography. A person on that curve can actually have their progress stalled or even decide to give up because of fighting with equipment that is not up to the task or not up to their skill level to make it perform well.

This is why I diasagree with... "Spending a lot of money on hi-tech equipment also makes it much easier to screw up."

On the contrary, I think it speeds the learning curve and success rate much more than struggling with low end equipment that takes a fairly high expertise level to get to work work effecively.

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Jim W Astro images