Introduction to Basic Astrophotograpy - The Moon

This class will cover basic principles of Astrophotography, focusing on the Moon and planetary imaging. The first part of this will be in the classroom, followed by (weather permitting) photography of the moon. We'll cover basic telescope types, types of mounts (Alt-Az vs Equatorial, and Goto,) types of cameras (DSLRs, phones,) and shooting modes, RAW vs JPEG vs video, Full frame vs crop sensors) which can directly attach to cameras using what's called a T-ring, or via projection from an eyepiece. As well as software that is very helpful for planning, such as Stellarium (http://stellarium.org/) Then we will discuss the usage of stacking and post-processing of images using Siril (https://free-astro.org/index.php/Siril) and Gimp (https://www.gimp.org/), all of which are free and open source software that you can use at home. Then we will be hopefully going outside, and using some of the telescopes I will be bringing to take pictures of the Moon. (Unfortunately, the only planets visible are up in the early morning.) If you have a Camera, feel free to bring it. I have adapters for Nikon and Canon cameras. If you don't, and have an SD card, you can feel free to bring that, and you can use one of my cameras. Kids are welcome, but are required to be supervised by parents. Image taken on 2017-12-07 and processed using the above process.