Best affordable telescope to start astrophotography?

hello folks welcome back to the s reform channel and thanks for tuning in in this particular video I want to share my thoughts on what I think is the best affordable telescope you can buy when you want to start your Astro photography or be in 2020 so without further ado let's get into it if you're new to my channel my name is Vito mounted I'm an amateur astrophotographer living in UTS the Netherlands where I perform my Astro photography and on my channel I share equipment brief news and tutorials that will hopefully also help you to improve your own Astro photography skills if you're interested in that kind of content please consider subscribe to my channel by clicking on the button on the bottom right of the screen and with that let's move on with the video so hi folks I just want to remind you that I am NOT the technical expert of telescopes and I'm not affiliated with any kind of brand but I have been into as a photography for a little bit over five years now where I went from imaging this picture of the Horsehead Nebula oops to imaging this picture of the Horsehead Nebula and basically what I have done is I have divided this video up into three parts so in the first part I will tell you about the four requirements that each beginner Esso photography telescope should have according to my personal opinion and then in the second part of the video I will talk about the different types of telescopes that are out there and what kind of telescope is most suited to start your Astro photography Hobie also according to my own personal thoughts and then in the third part of the video I will show you the as a photography telescope that I have been using this one for a couple of years now and I also talked about other telescopes that are out there on the market in 2020 that you might want to consider when starting your Astro photography hobby so let's get into the first part so let's talk about those four requirements that I think are important when you are looking to buy a beginner s of stock free telescope so the first requirement I would say is that your telescope has to be able to produce a high-quality image of your deep sky object so whether you are imaging in nebula a galaxy or star cluster you want a telescope that produce a good quality image and some of the cheaper telescopes they actually suffer from what is called chromatic aberration and chromatic aberration basically means that the telescope is unable to produce the correct colors of a deep sky object it produces a false colored image of your deep sky object and this is it does this is of course something you want to look for it and the second thing is that it's the chromatic aberration also results in purple halos around your white bright stars and that is very ugly and something you want to look for it and the second thing you want in high quality pictures is that your stars are nice and round and what is often an issue in extra photography is that you have nice round stars in the center of your image but when you go look towards the edges of those images you will see that the stars are getting more oval they look more like a cool nuts and/or star trails and you want to avoid that so the second requirement I would say is that your well that telescope that is affordable so when you're looking for your first s of photography telescope you're starting out this hobby you have to learn a lot of skills it takes some time and effort to do that so I would say don't spend a lot of money on your first telescope of course this depends on your financial situation but yeah you might go fall in love with this hobby you might melt and then you end up having to sell that telescope again so yeah that's just my personal opinion so affordability I think is important when you start out as of story the third thing I would say is ease of use so you want a beginner telescope that is very easy to use so let's imagine that you want to image from remote locations then you don't want a telescope that is very heavy and bulky to carry around and to put your mouth um and yeah I think that is very important and also you want a telescope that is ready to go so once you have set up your equipment you want to engage in a sofa Turco's photography you want to emit objects in the night sky and you don't want to wait for for instance a cool-down period of a telescope and so yeah I would say ease of use and then the fourth requirement is low maintenance so when you start out your astrophotography hoping you want a telescope that is relatively low in terms of maintenance because you won't spend to spend most of your time just outside learning all of the skills you need to learn to do astrophotography you don't want to spend that time necessarily on calibrating and maintaining your telescope so these are the four requirements that I would look for in a beginner a sub stove telescopes are the first si high quality picture the second one is affordability the third one is easy to set up and use and the fourth requirement would be relatively low in terms of maintenance so let's talk about different types of telescope and let's see whether each of those types of telescopes meet the requirements that I have just mentioned so in the second part of the video I just wanted to compare the different types of telescopes that are out there on the edge of photography market today and please keep in mind I'm making this video for people who are looking for their first s of dog food telescope to start RSO photography hobby with so I'm going to keep this a little bit general if you want to add something to this presentation that I've made don't hesitate to put some comments in the comment section below so we can get into a conversation I always like that it is social media so engage in the conversation if you want so I think when you are going to start buying your first as a photography telescope in 2020 you have to know the main difference between refractors and reflectors and it's not so difficult so let's get into that so a refractor is basically a lens based system so you can see here you have an objective lens that captures the light from a deep sky object for instance and then it reflects that light all - yeah an eyepiece of this can also be your the sensor of your camera and then you can engage in visual observations or Astro photography one thing you have to know about refractors though is that there are different types of refractors so we have the single lens refractors also called the aramid types of refractors you want to avoid that for astrophotography because they are not able to focus the different parts of the light spectrum so the blue the green and the red part of the light spectrum it will not be focused on to the same playing for instance the sake same camera sensor that you are using for astrophotography so you will end up with a false colored image of your deep sky object that you want to capture answer it will also create this very hideous purple halos around the bright white stars that you are capturing so don't go there I would not go there don't buy an agreement but you want maybe to buy an IDI or a doublet or two glass a type of reflector or an APO triplet type of refractor which uses three glasses and the main difference between IDI and an APO you can see it here so the IDI it focuses the red and the blue part of the light spectrum correctly onto your camera sensor but it has it will create some false colors with respect to the green but yeah in the universe there's not a lot of green light there so you can actually consider an IDI or doublet for astrophotography especially because there are also a little bit cheaper to buy and the APO triplet you can see that it correctly focuses all of the light in the light spectrum onto your camera sensor producing a correct colored image of your extra photo yeah all of the object that you want to image then we have the second type of telescopes they are reflectors or mirror based and this is also not difficult to understand so we have light here it comes in from your deep sky object that you're interested in imaging it falls onto a mirror then it gets reflected so that's also why they are called reflector so the light gets reflected from the primary mirror that sits at the date of your telescope onto a secondary mirror and then into an eyepiece or maybe you have here your camera that can image the object so yeah that is a very nice system and you have many different variations of reflective type of telescope so you can see here this is a Newtonian so you have a primary mirror and it bounces almost secondary mirror and it reflects again into an eyepiece that sits in front of your telescope but here you have a Ricci can type of telescope where you have a hyperbolic primary mirror it bounces over hyperbolic secondary mirror and then it ends up in in you're the only camera sensor or the eyepiece that is in the on the back of your camera so that's something you might consider those differences and yeah there are actually many different reflector types of mirror based types of telescopes and I have mentioned five of them here so on the one hand we have a refractor and I would say by an IDI or an apiary factor if you're interested in SEO photography and then you have all kinds of reflectors so we have a Newtonian reflector a red sea creature a row a common Smith as the graph Smith Cassegrain and a mock suit of type of telescope I don't want to get into the specifics of each of those Newtonian of the the each of those reflector type systems because that would take too much time for this video instead what I am going to do is to take my four criteria that I think are very important when you so you want to buy your first astrophotography telescope and then we are just going to see whether or not these telescope telescopes will meet those criteria hi folks I'm also interested in your personal experiences so please let me know what kind of telescope did you buy to start your Astro photography hobby or what kind of telescope are you considering to buy to start your s of photography hobby let me know in the comment section down below and we can get into a conversation with each other and with that let's move over the video if you have anything to add again or you disagree with me you're welcome to and to please leave a comment in the comment section so we can get into a conversation we have to distinguish planetary types of s of planetary astrophotography from deep sky s of photography and actually two types of telescopes the Smith Cassegrain and a mock suit of types of telescopes they are perfectly suited for planetary astrophotography they have a big aperture they have a long focal length they have a high F ratio this makes them all perfectly suited to capture the moon and the planets in our own solar system but that makes them less well-suited for deep sky Astro photography because for deep sky asked vertical photography you need actually a little bit lower F ratio and you might also want to start with a relatively wide field of view so what you have to understand is that the Smith Cassegrain and the Mach suit off they can focus on a very small piece in the night sky but that also will make it more difficult to track that very tiny object in the night sky accurately you have to have a high quality equatorial mount and you have to have high quality tracking gear to be able to do that so I would say that is not for a beginner and so that leaves us with these four telescope types so let's get onto the second criteria or what was it criteria that I have used which is affordability and then I would say although the ROE acumen Smith s graph is really a king of astrophotography I would say this is a very high quality telescope that you can buy it is also very costly because yeah I think in the US it goes an eighthinch Arase it goes for about $1,700 and in the you know in the Europe we have to pay the import v80 which is often 20% so then the rest I will will be you can buy them for about 2000 euros and yeah do you want to spend that amount of money on a telescope when you start your Astro photography also knowing that you and need other equipments as well so you need an equatorial mount you need some tracking gear you need a camera so I would say the RO Eckerman Smith s graph is maybe something you will buy as a second or a third telescope if you like the hobby so that leaves us with three types of telescopes and then of course we can talk about the ease of use and then I would say the rich secret chair is a little bit less easy to use as compared to a refractor or a Newtonian reflector now why yeah because the rich secret yeah it has also a little bit of a longer focal length and a higher F ratio so it isn't usually it tested about f/8 as an F ratio which makes it very very suitable to to capture very tiny objects in the night sky so for instance a galaxy that is far far away not referring to Star Wars or anything but yeah you these are very tiny in your field of view analytically Jets actually perfectly suited to to zoom in on that galaxy but again that also requires you to have high level tracking capability so I level tracking mount and yeah you you also need to master those scales so I would say a rarity creature is also more of a telescope that you will buy as a second or a third telescope so that leaves us with a refractor and a Newtonian reflector and then yeah the fourth requirement that I have mentioned was maintenance so maintenance I would say the reflector winds here because there's no maintenance required basically so you have a lens based system and these lenses they are just fixed in front of your telescope you need to put the reflector in a box and you need to keep it safely in your house of course but yeah I mean no maintenance required and the Newtonian reflector it actually requires collimation so collimation is basically the fact that you have to align the primary with the secondary mirror in order to produce a sharp picture for Esso photography and sometimes these mirrors they are out of alignment thank you needs to collimate your Newtonian reflector and actually this is something you can learn it also requires you to buy some extra tools in order to do to do the collimation but i would say when you just start doing SEO photography you want to spend as much time outside setting up your gear capturing objects in the night sky and maybe you don't want to spend that time on collimating you're maintaining your telescope so for me at least I would say the clear winner for a beginner astrophotography telescope in 2020 would be an IDI or an APO refractor and so yeah of course you can disagree with me please if you do let me know I would also say that the reflector is very easy to use because yeah it is it is usually very lightweight especially the wide field reflectors or which are maybe three inch or like 60 to 100 millimeters in in aperture they are very easy to carry around to set up they don't require any cooldown period I'm cooldown time you can just start your imaging session that is really really nice so yeah the reflector and then I want to move on to the third part where in which I will show you my own refractor and the choices I've made to buy that reflector for astrophotography purposes and we are also going to look at some of the refractor the IDI and the API refractors that are out there that you might want to consider to start your Astro photography Hobie so let's move on so I folks say I just wanted to show my first astrophotography telescope that I bought to get into this Oh be and that's the telescope service photo line 18 millimeter telescope and I bought it at a German company telescope service which is pretty pretty popular in Europe and so yeah I have to say I really like this telescope for several reasons so let's get into that first of all this is an 18 millimeter aperture 480 millimeter focal length telescope so the F ratio of this telescope is f6 and yeah this makes it a pretty good suitable telescope for deep sky astrophotography of course but also the fainter objects such as nebula that are out there to capture and so yeah there are a couple of things that I also really like such as we have here the standard do captain is included in the oldest telescope so you can just extend the do cap and yeah it will protect you from some humidity and moisture on humid days or humid nights I have to say in the Netherlands it can be so so humid that you still would need a new heater to keep your lands perfectly clean but anyway I like the fact that this thing is included in the telescope also if you look at the triplet apo elements there is one element that has the FPL 53 gloves and so yeah as I said I'm not a technical expert but if you look at all of the fora you will read that the FPL 53:3 element is a very high-quality piece of glass and it will actually produce the correct colors of a deep sky object and so yeah because this is a white filter reflector there're plenty of advantages because yeah it's easy to carry around it's not so heavy it's easy to set up and use and of course it will give you a wide field view so with my CW o 1600 I have about one and half to two degrees of view with this reflector and that makes it perfectly suitable for those very nice nebulae that are out there in our galaxy so you can see some of them over here actually so we have the heart nebula rosette nebula and the North American nebula and these are actually not the true color these are narrowband images but anyway so you can see that they you can perfectly capture those kind of nebula also the Ryan and the Horsehead Nebula they are pretty popular of course among starting astrophotographers you can really really capture those kind of nebula using this was such a wild white field refractor such as this one and what can I say more so it was also include these two rims are included so I mounted my trekking gear here so the tech tracking Cal telescope tracking camera here and what I also really like is the fact that it has this a robust focusing system my hopes you can see it there you have here the black wheel and the golden wheel actually the black wheel you can you can turn or turn it around for rough kind of focusing then for fine focusing to really get these pinpoint sharp stars in your picture you can use the golden wheel which is much more accurate in there in terms of getting getting these pinpoint accurate stars basically so okay yeah this is basically these are some of the reasons why I bought this telescope as my first as a photography telescope to start my hobby and I have to say I I looked disappointed that I did that I really got some great value out of it produce some great images for me so now I can highly recommend it but of course yeah are many there are many Whitefield refractors out there so let's take a look at the answer photography market and see what kind of telescopes are out there that I would consider in 2020 to start off your Astro photography homie hi folks in this part of the video I just want to quickly show you a little bit what is available in terms of an API reflector a wide field apo triplet refractor that you want to buy maybe for your first Esther photos as as your first as photography telescope I know that there are many different sides and many different options so please do your own research check out the different sites that where you can buy telescopes and just also go to fora and ask people who have bought the telescope already what their experiences are with it let's check out here in the US a four inches opt Corp is a very famous online shop where you can buy your Astro photography gear and so yeah I you basically have made some selections so we want yeah and a refractor that is maybe three or four inch so 67 to 126 millimeter if possible with the price below $1,000 or up to $1,000 so and then you can see I have put also f7 up to f4 or faster reason and here as a search term and then basically you can see that there are six interesting options at optical Pressley so you can see here an explorer scientific which actually has a large aperture so it's 102 millimeter aperture so it's more as compared to the 80 millimeter telescope that I showed you my own telescope and yeah it's an APO triplet refractor so that's I would say it's a very interesting option for below $1,000 I'm actually surprised that these reflectors keep getting cheaper and cheaper and then also this 80 millimeter triplet a carbon fiber option form Rion Rion refractor telescope this is really a popular one that a lot of people have bought and yeah but I always do is always I will of course read the description and then it says for instance that it has this FPL 53 extra low dispersion glass and this is the high quality piece of glass that you want to look for in an APO refractor because it gets you this true cord image of a deep sky object not to say that other types of glasses are maybe of lower quality but I mean I just know that the FPL 53 is highly liked among astrophotographers so yeah always also check if it's really a triplet apo refractor sometimes you're looking you think you're looking at the triplet but you are actually then looking at the doublet which only has two pieces of glass as I showed you before so check that or always check out these kind of things and also I would also look at the F ratio for instance this is an F I don't know what kind of F ratio the Orion has actually so the Orion it has an f6 and then I saw here for instance the Explorer scientific 80 millimeters also is an f6 triplet but then the Evo star which is also triplet to Sky Watcher it has an F ratio of F 7.5 and I would I think I would always go for the telescope that has a lower F ratio because you don't need a lot of exposure time to capture the deep sky objects that you are interested in so let's switch over to a European shop this is a telescope service here a very popular online shop in Germany and throughout Europe I basically selected on APO refractor below 1000 euros and oh we have here is this English or German the souq suger gave Nisa maybe I have to switch to English anyway so did I this really surprised me the TS optics photo line 150 millimeter f7 it is 999 of course just one euro below the 1000 and but I'm I'm really surprised that this has a 150 millimeter aperture and sin f7 triplets APO it has this FPL 53 glass so that's really really really interesting I would say I wouldn't have expected that these triplets of 150 millimeter you could buy them below the 1000 euro range but yeah TS telescope service has one very interesting buy I would say of course you can here see some of the other brands that telescope service telescopes they have so the 80 millimeter f6 this is the one I have bought actually it's now for 848 euros I think I bought it a little bit as a higher price actually two years ago so you can see that these prices keep on dropping from four four refractors at least yeah just a lot of options of course the VIX explore scientific you can see here also only a 592 euros 80 millimeter f6 I think is this a triplet apo I would say if noon ox ox ox see millimeter millimeter I think I can switch to English right aperture of 80 millimeter focal length there was an f6 yeah it's a 3 element so it's an APO refractor with better chromatic correction then annoy to area is better than do Bloods but I don't I think it doesn't have the FPL 53 class I think is explore scientific it uses a different type of class but anyway so I would always say check out these sites go to astrophotography for ask people who have bought the telescope what their their experiences are with this telescope and yeah basically do your own research so hi folks red handle the video I just want to thank you for watching and I have noticed that I have reached 1000 subscribers on my channel so thank you very much for subscribing especially the people who subscribed in January you can see the names over here and of course I will continue to make astrophotography video so if you want me to handle any kind of topic please let me know in the comment section and I will see whether or not I can make a video out of it if you like this particular video don't forget to give this video thumbs up I really appreciate that and of course I hope to see you in one of my other videos on my channel and so yeah until the time I want to thank you for watching clear skies see you later bye bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: AstroForum

Views: 257,841

Rating: 4.878448 out of 5

Keywords: astrophotography, astronomy, astrography, astrophotographer, astronomer, amateur, backyard, cosmos, space, universe, photos, nightsky, longexposure, telescope, mount, buy, beginner, affordable

Id: LmX0OkXHoSY

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2020