This is my first post describing my astrophotography equipment setup. A basic setup includes a telescope, mount, tripod, camera and an array of accessories to visualize and photograph the sky. My primary 2020 GoTo setup comprises of the Celestron Nexstar Evolution 8 HD Telescope including:

Celeston’s 8″ inch SCT can be bought as a aluminum or a carbon fiber tube. A Carbon fiber tube minimizes thermal expansion with ambient temperature changes. This is incredibly useful in a place like Michigan where the temperature drops drastically during winter nights. A drawback is that it takes the tube much more time to reach a stable temperature when you first take it out. Celestron’s EdgeHD optics is a must for superb visual and astroimaging performance that is free of coma and field curvature.

The Nexstar Evolution is a computerized Alt-Azimuth mount that is great for visual but not ideal for long exposure astrophotography. You can still get great short exposures and stack them up for a great picture. This is a great starter mount because of its light weight and convenient features like a USB charge port, adjustable lighting, precision machined worm gears for both axes, in-built WiFi and rechargeable lithium-iron phosphate battery with enough power for 10 hours of continuous observing.

Celestron’s Starsense Autolign is worth its price for people who are looking for a automated alignment solution. This is especially important for city dwellers, light pollution can make it difficult to find stars for manual alignment of your telescope.  The camera automatically captures a series of images of the sky. StarSense identifies the stars in the images, matching them to its database. Once a positive match is confirmed, StarSense calculates the coordinates of the center of the captured image, thereby determining exactly where the telescope is pointed.

I have always been an advocate of cellphone cameras and I use my Google Pixel 4 XL for day time photography. The phone also includes software that allows you to take beautiful photos of the night sky using its “Astrophotography” mode. The camera captures 16 second snapshots and stacks them to ive you an incredible image. The small pixel size compared to today’s DSLR and mirrorless cameras is a big drawback but your phone will help you get started before you decide to upgrade.

  • Accessories

A telescope setup is incomplete without basic accessories that can help you observe the night sky. The Celestron Nexstar Evolution 8 HD package comes with 3 eye pieces – 2” E-lux 32mm, a 1.25” Omni 15mm, and a 1.25” Omni 9mm. The telescope also includes a 2” Star Diagonal with 1.25” adapter and a StarPointer Pro finderscope. Celestron also provides a copy Celestron PWI software that can help you control the telescope using your laptop. I also recommend downloading the Celestron’s Sky Portal app on your phone, this can easily replace the hand controller, thus allowing you to automatically align and move the telescope wirelessly.

I can’t wait to get started with this setup. I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful.