For the pros here, who have equipment worth tens of thousands of moneys, this may sound like a troll post, but trust me, it isn’t :D
As a beginner, I had a lot of fun photographing the night sky and learning all the post-processing the results of my work for the last months.
A lot of my work went straight to the trash, either because of a bad moon phase, light pollution, condensation, or super stupid mistakes, like forgetting to tick a checkmark in my time lapse mode and then coming home after 2 hours of freezing cold temperatures and seeing that your shutter speed has been 0.2 seconds all along… 😵💫 I still learnt a lot from my mistakes and improved rapidly. It was a lot of trial by error, but rewarding.
One thing I still fight with is said condensation.
I’m both broke ^(or, even if I had the money, I still wouldn’t buy a heating mantle for 250€ just for my amateur photos tbh)^ , and my camera is probably a joke compared to yours.
My workaround has been to use small hand warmers.
(If you don't know what I mean)
(the ones you have to boil first, then click the metal clip, and then they “freeze”, becoming warm for 30 minutes)
I activate and then press them against the front of the lens for one minute each 5 minutes or so, which of course sometimes results in
- camera shake,
- missing photos,
- and in the worst case, smears on the photo, which won’t even be recoverable with my flats.
The reason for doing that is that I have a Sony RX100 III compact camera, which has a super small lens, so no heating mantle can fit on that.
A friend of mine is already more advanced than me and owns one, but his heating mantle is like 20 cm wide, while my lens is 5 cm max when fully drawn out :D
Do you have any cheap alternatives or DIY solutions for my problem?
Also, does anyone have an idea or suggestion on what I can use as star tracker
(?)
(the mount-thing that moves my camera with the rotation of the earth)
when I don’t want to spend $$$ on a professional one?
I don’t need a super expensive or accurate one, just one that allows me to increase the width of my photo, so I don’t have to crop >1/3 of it in the end.
I don’t need it to keep my shutter speed at 1 minute+, just to keep it below 15s, like I currently do.
Are there any workarounds, like using an Arduino or so?
Right now, I’m a bit restricted to about ~30 photos @ 10s, because elseway, the crop zone is too small or there are small trails forming.
There are USB powered dew heaters on amazon for pretty cheap, and work just fine for small lenses. I think I got mine for $15 a few years ago, and I already had a battery pack laying around. In a pinch you could use some non-reusable iron oxide hand warmers rubber banded to the lens, which could give a couple hours of warmth.
In terms of trackers the cheapest I’ve seen is the Nyx tracker at $130, but I know some people have managed to DIY them for a little cheaper. I’ve never used one so I cant speak for how well it works, but I imagine you’ll at least be able to get some longer exposure times if it’s polar aligned well.
Thank you a lot for the advice! :)
Good idea, I’ll look into it.
Never thought about that, wow! My GF has some self-sticking warming pads she needs for her special week, maybe I’ll just grab one of that and try that out.
I think I will try to research further and maybe consider building my own one for the beginning. As an idea, I have a 3D-printer and could make something like this for example (was just my first search result I found).
I really don’t have high expectations, it doesn’t even need to fit the earths’ rotation exactly 🙃 Just like how I didn’t buy a LED light panel (~ 20 bucks, including battery) specifically for the flats, and instead use my E-reader display instead, I don’t want to spend more money than really necessary on the tracker.
Its’ main purpose at the moment is, like mentioned in the post, just to decrease the area I have to crop when editing, since I currently am limited to ~30 lights before the sky has moved too much, preventing further stacking. Oh, and depending on how well it works, maybe increase my shutter speed from 7-12s to about 15 or 20s, who knows.
If course, just as a disclaimer, if I “really” want to start astrophotography, and get a better camera, then a proper tracker and stuff is needed for sure :)
Thank you for your answer!
I have the OG star tracker, which is pretty solid and would easily handle your camera. Although if you want to go super budget and I imagine you could just get a stepper motor and driver board, design some attachment for your camera and try and get it to step between exposures so you can just avoid the manual reframing like you said.