About: I am an electronics engineer working in telecommunications in the UK. Generally I work on chip design for digital radio receivers. I like all things arty and consider chip design a bit arty :) Basically I h…

Hello to those interested,

My name is Dave and I live in Bristol in the UK. One of my primary hobbies for a number of years now has been 'Deep Space AstroPhotography'. This is a fascinating and extremely challenging hobby which turns quickly into somewhat of an obsession - so what is it exactly ?

Deep Space AstroPhotography is all about taking photographs of all manner of space objects such as galaxies, nebula, clusters and many other deep space object normally invisible to the naked eye. We require an optically very good telescope on a computer controller tracking equatorial mount. We also need some type of camera, some use a standard DSLR. I use dedicated imaging cameras which are sensor deep cooled to around -30C the purpose of this cooling being to minimise accumulated thermal noise generated by very long (up to 30 minute) single exposures. Images are created by taking many single long exposures and then aligning them and stacking them. This stacking is performed in order to improve the signal to noise ratio SNR. In addition to images of the target a whole array of calibration frames is usually taken to characterise both the camera noise and the optical chain. In is common to require many many hours of data in order to produce one single finished image.

Here is link to my Astro Photography website : www.dt-space.co.uk/AstroImages

(click on thumb nail images to enlarge)

Until recently my imaging set up has been portable. So if a nice clear crisp night with good imaging conditions presented itself I would have to take all the gear from my workshop and set it all up out on the patio. The equipment is heavy but delicate not to mention a lot of wiring that needs doing. Once all the gear is assembled I would then have to go through a polar alignment process to line the mount axis up with the Earth's axis of rotation. All in all at least 40 minutes work assuming nothing goes wrong and then of course I would I have then to take it all apart again at some silly time in the morning when everything is covered in frost ! With the unpredictable UK weather conditions would have to be really good for it to be worth all the effort.

What I needed was a much more permanent arrangement where I could be up and running or packed away in less than five minutes with little effort. That way I could take advantage of those nights where only a few hours of good conditions were available.

Luckily I have two buildings in my garden. I have a lovely purpose built workshop, well insulated and warm. I also have a block built shed/outhouse which was begging for an observatory conversion. The subject of this article is to describe the process I went through to convert the block shed into an Astro Imaging observatory.

I hope you enjoy the description - comments and suggestions always more than welcome !