Let your Astrophotography Journey Begin!
I invite you to go outside on a dark and cold night (Yes- cold is better – just bundle up). What you are looking at is not modern, nor does it necessarily exist anymore. You are looking at history. The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy. The Andromeda galaxy is approximately 2.5 million light-years away from Earth. This means the light we see from it today left the galaxy 2.5 million years ago. In other units, this is about 24 quintillion kilometers or 1.5 quintillion miles away. Stop and think about that. The light that you are seeing right now, left 2.5 million years ago. If the Andromeda galaxy disappeared 1 million years ago, we would never know. Our kids would never know it, and 100 generations form now would never know it. Most humans have a hard time with this concept. I have a hard time with this concept.
There are a lot of people out there who feel that taking pictures of the night sky will be extremely expensive and challenging to do. Ten years ago that might be true. But today there are really amazing options that make astrophotography easy and affordable. Take for example two smart telescopes that are on the market that are sub $600 in cost and can be setup and used from your backyard with little effort. What in the world am I talking about? The Dwarflabs Dwarf3 smart telescope costs $500 and out of the box takes amazing pictures. Just look at the picture above of the Andromeda Galaxy. That image was taken with the Dwarf3 from my Bortle 7 backyard. The hardest part of using theDwarf3 is having a cloudless night. Even with the Full Moon nothing stops this scope. By the way, I am not sponsored by DwarfLabs and I paid for my own D3. I can easily recommend them because the product and support has been fantastic.
Other options? Seestar S30 and S50. I wouldn’t mind getting myself a S50 in the future as well. You can never have enough astrophotography equipment. Oh and by the way, my equipment list consists of some very advanced other solutions like a $5000 ZWO Astrophotography setup and an advanced DSLR with a Celestron telescope. Guess what I bring out each night? The Dwarf 3.
