Autoguiding is the difference between a stack full of egg-shaped stars and a stack of tight, round ones you can push to ten or twenty minute subs. If you have ever wondered which autoguider to buy, the honest answer is that the guide train is only half the decision. The other half is matching the … Read more
The best light pollution filters for astrophotography fall into four clear classes, and the right one depends almost entirely on what you are shooting. Dual-band narrowband filters are the strongest choice for emission nebulae from bright skies. CLS and UHC broadband filters are the right answer for galaxies, star clusters and anything where you want … Read more
Coma is the reason stars on the edge of a wide-field image look like tiny comets instead of pinpoints. A parabolic Newtonian mirror focuses on-axis light perfectly but smears off-axis light into that comet shape, and the faster the telescope, the worse the smear. The fix is a small lens group — a coma corrector … Read more
The best GoTo mount for deep sky imaging is a properly polar-aligned equatorial mount rated at roughly 1.5 times your total payload. Most imagers settle on a belt-driven worm gear model such as the Celestron Advanced VX or Sky-Watcher EQ6-R for repeatable sub-arcsecond guiding, while lighter rigs and travel setups do well with a tracker … Read more
A star tracker tripod is a photographic tripod sturdy and damped enough to carry a driven tracking mount, a small motorised head that slowly rotates your camera to follow the stars, without flexing, twisting or creeping during multi-minute exposures. Buy the best tripods for star trackers wrong and you put every trail the tracker was … Read more
If you shoot the Milky Way with anything wider than about 24mm, a decent tripod is enough to get a usable frame. Push past that, or push past 15-20 seconds per exposure, and you need a star tracker: a small motorised head that sits between your tripod and your camera and rotates at the Earth’s … Read more
Planets are bright but tiny. That single fact decides almost everything about picking an eyepiece for them: you are never short of light, so what you are really shopping for is magnification that stays sharp, contrast that survives the atmosphere, and an eye relief you can hold steady for twenty minutes. After spending six weeks … Read more
A Barlow lens is the cheapest way to get more power out of a telescope you already own. It is a negative (diverging) lens that slides into the focuser, so a 25mm eyepiece on a 2x Barlow behaves like a 12.5mm eyepiece. For most observers buying their first one, the best barlow lenses for telescopes … Read more
The first night out with a telescope is usually a disappointment. You point the thing at a random patch of sky, see a grey smudge or nothing at all, and decide astronomy is expensive and hard. The problem is almost never the scope. Nobody taught you the sky first, and a phone screen of red … Read more
Solar viewing is the one thing almost every telescope owner does in their first year and almost nobody does properly. The Sun looks calm, but looking at it through an unfiltered telescope focuses enough energy into the eyepiece to destroy your retina in a fraction of a second. That is not a warning label on … Read more