Any tips for imaging under heavy light pollution? Suburban Astrophotography · Chris Sullivan · ... · 57 · 1527 · 4

I really don't need the answers, but i wanted this thread to have kind of a conclusion or verdict, long pages mostly confusing or get some lost, i really didn't read all the posts here, so that i wanted to see what was the conclusion.

I do have a monochrome camera and NB filters with LRGB, and it is not very bad light pollution here yet, so wanted to see of there is better solutions for heavy light pollution then in not heavy light pollution it will be better.

Thank you very much for the last 2-3 posts 

Been reading through this and the cloudynights link above.

I am very new to all of this. I just recently got my first telescope less than a month ago (celestron 6se). I live near Chicago 8-9 bortle. While I am still learning visual astronomy I already have the bug to start taking photos. Reading through posts of how people obtain their amazing photos I get lost in a lot of the lingo. So I was hoping someone could direct me to a good starting point/thread.

What I really want to do is use my existing Canon 70d, get a recommended lens, and then maybe a skywatcher 2i eq mount or something similar. I am not quite ready to go full bankrupt on it, but know that between the lens and eq mount I am looking at or near $1000 to start out.

I see people talk about exposures of 5 hrs and a lot more. I assume this isn't all one picture and it is multiple shorter pictures or are they actually taking one picture for 5 hrs? Any tips or suggestions on how to get started would be amazing. Thanks in advance.

Welcome here!

You already answered yourself, to start out you need or have to get an EQ mount, anything else coming later, you can always start with what you have as a camera and lens, then upgrade from there, and if i have to advice you then i will tell you get the mount first and a cooled camera no matter a mono or color as it will help to a degree, the lens or telescope is last whenever you can afford, many used lenses for great results such as the glory of 135mm lens, or 200mm, i have Canon lenses and i am using 135mm and 300mm although i already have telescopes.

About doing exposures for like 5 hours, it definitely means exposure frames shorter times and later they stack them for total long time, many use 3min up to 10min single exposure and they take so many frames so they can stack later, going for like 1 hour single frame exposure will cause much more issues than having many frames of shorter exposures for 1 hour, two main issues are the artifacts lines [planes, meteors, lights,...etc] and the star trails if something happened to the mount or guiding and then 1 hour all lost in single frame.

Being very new at this I am really relying on my goto mount to put whatever I target in frame. I am sure this time perfect but living in a bortle 8-9 I can’t really see much with my naked eye. Last night I had the goto point at something and a took 200 or so photos but on my first attempt on deepskystacker I really didn’t see anything. So I have no clue if:

1. the goto didn’t target correctly
2. just too much light pollution or not powerful enough scope
3. not long enough exposures due to light pollution and no eq mount.

I guess I am just trying to figure out next steps. So far I have only gotten good pictures of the moon and Orion Nebula but both those are out of my field of view for a bit.

You should try plate solving your subs to see if you were on target. Go to astrometry.net and upload one - it'll tell you if you were in the ballpark or not. You can input the coordinates into Stellarium to see how close you were if the target itself isn't showing up in the annotated plate solve. Every Messier object should be doable from your LP (well, M74 and M76 could be pretty tough depending on your setup). I shoot from a Bortle 7-8 transition zone and have been able to accomplish a good deal, but what really changed things for me was the switch to monochrome. Other than that, I try to aim for a massive amount of total integration time - at least 20 hours on any broadband target (except maybe the über bright ones like M42 and M31). I find it the best way to combat heavy LP.