Gear

The Askar V is a unique telescope system that features two interchangeable 60mm and 80mm ED apochromatic objectives, a reducer, a flattener and an extender. This offers six distinct focal lengths from 270mm to 600mm. Wide and sweeping one night, tight and intimate the next.

The part of the setup most people never see, yet everything depends on it. A seriously light-weight harmonic-drive mount that carries the full imaging rig, tracking the slow rotation of the sky with quiet, backlash-free precision. Small enough to travel anywhere, steady enough to trust completely; and the integrated laser is very cool!

A half-kilo star tracker in a carbon fibre filled PETG housing, with a green laser pointer built in for polar alignment. It turns the camera slowly with the sky, so a wide-angle lens can take exposures of minutes rather than seconds without the stars trailing.

A cooled, guided, controlled imaging system compressed into a single body. The Sony IMX585 sensor at its heart is extraordinarily sensitive to faint light, and the built-in cooling pulls heat from the chip to keep the long exposures clean and quiet. Guide camera, controller, and wireless connection are all folded in, leaving nothing between the telescope and the sky but the lens cap, before it comes off.

A self-contained smart telescope that plate-solves, tracks and stacks without a laptop or a mount to set up. It is the fastest route from carrying a bag outside to watching an image build on a phone screen, which makes it the one piece of kit that gets used on nights when nothing else would.

A broadband light pollution filter for one-shot-colour cameras, intended for galaxies, star clusters and reflection nebulae, the targets where a dual narrowband filter is no help at all. Optolong themselves do not recommend it above Bortle 7, which makes it an interesting thing to test from a Bortle 8 balcony.

A dual narrowband filter passing 7nm bands at Hydrogen-alpha and Oxygen-III, and blocking nearly everything else, including most city skyglow. That is what makes emission nebulae workable from a Bortle 8 balcony. The trade is exposure time, because rejecting that much light means much longer sub-exposures.

A 3nm dual narrowband filter, tighter than the 7nm L-eXtreme on both the Hydrogen-alpha and Oxygen-III bands. Narrower passbands mean better contrast against skyglow and a heavier penalty in signal, so it suits slower optics and longer integrations.

A 2 inch eyepiece and filter set kept for visual observing rather than imaging. Useful for finding and framing a target by eye before the camera goes on, and for handing the telescope to someone who would rather look through it than at a screen.

Holds a 2 inch filter in a slide-out drawer so filters can be changed without taking the imaging train apart. Focus and backfocus spacing stay untouched, which removes the main reason to avoid swapping filters part-way through a session.

An electronic autofocuser that fits over the focuser knob and is driven from the ASIAIR. It refocuses as the temperature drifts through the night, which matters more than expected on a fast optical system where the usable focus tolerance is a few tens of microns.

Keeps the S30's 30mm aperture but moves to an 8.3MP IMX585 behind a 160mm f/5.3 quadruplet, and adds a wide-angle camera for Milky Way and star-trail work. More resolution and more coverage, not more light.

A tripod and fluid head pair that on a Seestar unlocks equatorial mode: tilt the whole unit to the celestial pole and sub length goes from a 10 to 30 second alt-az ceiling up to 60 seconds, with round stars into the corners. Off a Seestar, it works as a smooth, damped panning head for visual and casual imaging.

My first ever telescope, and the one that started all of this. A 72mm ED doublet apochromat at 420mm focal length, f/5.8. Light enough to sit on a small mount without complaint, and short enough to frame large nebulae. Doubles as a guidescope and as a grab-and-go visual instrument.

The camera I got started in astrophotography with, paired with the Samyang 135mm, the Samyang 14mm and the Rokinon 18mm. A 24-megapixel full-frame mirrorless body that has aged into one of the best-value low-light cameras available. Clean at ISO 6400, dependable on long exposures, and the camera behind the Milky Way landscapes and the Geminids composite in the gallery.

A manual telephoto with an almost unreasonable reputation among astrophotographers. Sharp corner to corner wide open, fast enough to reach faint nebulosity in minutes, and effectively a very well corrected 135mm refractor that happens to fit a camera mount.

Two manual ultra-wides that do the same job from slightly different distances: cover as much sky as possible, as fast as possible, for as little as possible. These are the meteor shower and Milky Way lenses, and neither of them needs autofocus to do it.

256Wh of lithium iron phosphate in a box the size of a shoebox, running the entire rig from its 12V car socket. A 300W AC outlet, a 12.6V DC output rated to 100W, and a measured eleven-watt draw that turns a night's power into something you stop thinking about.

A short, stiff carbon fibre tripod built for equatorial mounts rather than cameras. Two leg sections instead of three, 40.4mm tubes and a triangular centre brace, with a flat drilled plate on top for a mount head to bolt straight down onto.