Hi! My name is Maarten Rolefes and I carry out this 'hobby' from my backyard in The Netherlands. I live in a part of the country where light pollution is still manageable.
Normally, I collect all my imaging data from my Backyard, it’s a Bortle 5 class which gives pretty satisfying results using proper light pollution filters. As an Astrophotographer on a budget, shooting from a light polluted area, you basically have two options;
Save money for (dark-sky) Astro trips and spent less on equipment
Spent the money on equipment and deal with the light pollution
I chose to do the latter one, because it gives me more time at home and I can grab every opportunity to image whenever we have a clear sky. I say ‘grab the opportunity’ because it sometimes also feels that way, after a day of work you just feel a bit de-motivated to setup all the equipment (I don't have an observatory or dedicated shack, yet).
But the knowledge that I can add a few more hours worth of valuable data makes me motivated in a blink and I’ll be setting up my equipment and be ‘image ready’ in an hour or so.
This is a list of the equipment I currently use;
NEQ 6 Pro – upgraded with a Rowan belt
Altair Astro Ritchey Chretien 10” at F8
Atik 383L+ mono CCD cooled camera
Lodestar off-axis guidecamera
Starlight Express motorized 7 position filterwheel
Astrodon LRGB 36mm unmounted filters
Primaluce Sesto Senso 2 Robotic Focusing Motor
Acer Aspire One laptop to control all the hardware using Sequence Generator Pro and PHD2 for guiding
This is not the first telescope setup I use. Back in 2014 I started to do some ‘serious’ astrophotography using a dedicated imaging setup on a CPC800 and a Hyperstar from Starizona. The CPC800 had an Alt-Az mount, which isn’t meant to be used for long exposure photography due to field rotation. So, a Wedge was needed which essentially transforms it into an EQ mount.
The Hyperstar attaches to the front of the telescope (you have to remove the secondary mirror) and transforms the F10 setup into a mind-blowing fast F2. It also makes the field of view very wide which makes imaging more forgiving in case of any tracking and/or guiding issues. I used a QHY10 colour CCD cooled camera, which gave some very nice results.
Allot of knowledge was build up these days what to do but also what not to do.
