Your next step in astrophotography: A STAR TRACKER

Open up any issue of this magazine and you’ll see beautiful images of constellations, planets and deep-sky objects on its pages, many taken by readers. As light pollution increases, both around and above us, astrophotography – taking photos of objects in the night sky – is now the primary pursuit of many amateur astronomers who, instead of looking through their telescope’s eyepiece, now use it as a camera to take portraits of the Universe.

Astrophotography, of course, isn’t new; if you jumped in the TARDIS and went back to the 1980s, to the heady days of the New Romantics and the first Space Shuttle launches, amateur astronomers were taking photos, but there were no digital SLRs or CCD cameras. Instead, night-sky photographers loaded up their manual SLR cameras with rolls of photographic film and then either printed out the images or had them processed as slides. Some ‘push-processing’ and enhancement was possible, using special chemicals or darkroom techniques, but not much.

Fast forward to today and things have moved