How to take better-untracked pictures in astrophotography

Don't have a tracking mount? Then use this article to help with your subs, data, and more in astrophoto.

By JasonPublished about a year ago • 3 min read

The orion nebula with an untracked mount

First off this article is aimed at deep sky astrophotographers that have a decent 8" and up aperture scope and a dedicated astrophotography camera. WARNING NEVER EVER BUY A TRASH SCOPE like a “1000X power scope with amazing X5 Barlow lens and 3mm eyepiece,” you will be pissed off if you buy them and it will save a lot of frustration go for good scopes like the skywatcher 200p classic dob. Now put your nerd cap on we are about to dive into the world of frustration, dark nights, bug bites, failures, OCD, and sleep loss which will, in turn, it will be worth it the images you produce.

Right off the bat, you will need to properly collimate your telescope or the images will turn out to be fuzzy and out of focus. After you’ve done that to save a lot of time searching the sky the old fashion way and dragging your scope pointlessly for 30 minutes until you find Jupiter ALIGN YOUR FINDERSCOPE to do this point your telescope at a distant still object and focus it (use your lowest powered eyepiece its the one with the highest number on the side) then center it the short tube provided with your telescope that goes right next to your eyepiece is the finderscope adjust the screws until the image in there ad the eyepiece are both centered now all you have to do is center the object in your eyepiece then you will see it in your eyepiece.

Secondly, choose your dso and point your finderscope at it and then center it within your eyepiece and plug in your camera opened with the sharp cap free software you will be overwhelmed at first but as a beginner, you will probably not need to look at every single piece of the software so depending on your manufacturer and company you may need to download their driver usually provided with the manual then download sharp cap and install it one do those connect your camera and click open sharp cap and click on the cameras button on the top menu and select your camera.

Depending on your object you may need longer exposure times so to adjust this look at the sidebar and adjust the exposure until the object is fairly visible in your camera, WARNING DO NOT OVEREXPOSE IT BECAUSE YOU ARE UN TRAKAED THIS WILL CAUSE PAIN WHEN PROCESSING YOUR IMAGES AND WILL CAUSE TRAILY STARS. Choose the AVI format in the dropdown then you will also see a gain slider in the side menu also adjust this to around 250 depending on your object don't let it get too grainy.

If you have slow-motion controls use them to track the object across the sky making SMALL adjustments when your object gets out of the FOV or if you have a Dobsonian without slo-mo controls push the scope slightly to track the object. When you are taking pictures you can either shoot a video or take multiple pictures called subs and stack them in Deepsky stacker and use GIMP or photoshop to mark them up. Your first pictures may be bad but don’t worry astrophotography is kind of like a sport the more experience you gain and the more good things over bad things you know it takes time and effort to do this “sport” note that this is NOT A CHEAP hobby/job.