Now that Neowise is pretty much gone, I think I've learned a lot of what I needed a week and a half ago to photograph it. On the bright side, what I've learened so far will likely come in handy for future attempts at photographing astronomical events.
These notes are just a brain dump, I've almost certainly missed a lot, they need to be flushed out, but I bet that with the propensity for folks on the net to correct what they perceive as mistakes, just posting these notes should gain me mostly helpful advice back threefold. I won't estimate how much unhelpful advice and snide comments I'm likely to get in addition. The earlier/more you do prep the better Get all gear together first bring masking tape to lock focus focus on jupiter or similar Bring a second tripod to aim at focus point bring spares Most important is clarity of skies speed of lens is almost more important than length Best results are astrotracer at shortest period, wish it went faster than 10 seconds Ball heads suck. What I really want is tripod head that adjusts with cranks. Make sure all quick release mounts point in same direction need a spotting scope or laser pointer mounted in hot shoe (but it has to be precise) laser pointer would likely mess things up for other people Really need real equatorial mount No matter how well I do, the hubble or equivalent will do better go for artistic Make a checklist: calibrate astrotracer, lock down tripod head, gear list, right focal length for mf lenses Use skymaps or equivalent to scout places before hand. Computational photography will continue to get better, but can't go back and reshoot, get darkfield and make raw images best When using astrotracer, set external intervalometer at 1 second, Need stacking software Need slideshow/timelapse software wide AoV of K-1 very useful, particularly for finding objects at same focal length -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
