Taking Pictures On-line Articles
On-line Resources
Mailing Lists, Discussion Groups A mailing list is a sort of informal club that you join where members exchange messages on topics of common interest. There are also web-based mailing lists where you can read messages on a web page, or subscribe via email. You subscribe to the mailing list, and if you have a question, you email it to one email address for the list, and everyone who subscribes to the list then receives a copy of your question. Since there is a wide range of experience levels among members of the list, someone is almost certainly going to be able to answer your question. There are a hundreds, if not thousands, of mailing lists and discussion groups dedicated to specific subjects, so you can always do a search on Google to find the one you are interested in. You can also go to the Yahoo Groups main page and do a search for a specific group there.
General Resources for Astronomy and Astrophotography Getting started in a new hobby is an exciting time! There's a whole world of stuff to learn, new equipment to master, and new friends to make. There are several sources of information that you can use to learn about astronomy: the internet, books and magazines, and people. The internet is great because there is really good information there and it is free. You just have to watch out for the kooks. It's always good to keep your bs detector turned on high. Keep an open mind about things, but not so open that your brains fall out. Remember that there is a fundamental difference between science and superstition. If you ever have any doubts about whether something is legitimate, check out Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy pages at: http://www.badastronomy.com/ where he separates myth and misconception in astronomically related topics. Books
Magazines
People
Star Charts
Astronomical Planetarium Software
In all of these programs you can specify the focal length of your telescope and the size of the sensor in your camera and then plot the field of view of your setup as an overlay on a star map. This helps tremendously in determining the best framing of a particular object with your equipment. These programs can also control the pointing of your telescope if it has a compliant Go To protocol. |
||
|
Back | Up | Next |
by Terence Dickinson
by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer
by Terence Dickinson & Jack Newton.
by Michael Covington.
, Brad Wallis & Robert Provin 
by Ron Wodaski
by Wil Tirion - A good beginners star atlas which contains more than nine thousand stars down to magnitude 6.5 on 10 charts, with lists of deep sky objects on the facing page of each chart. It costs about $11.
second edition by Wil Tirion and Roger Sinnott - The best atlas of star charts on a constellation scale with 26 charts and 81,312 stars down to magnitude 8.5 and 2,700 deep sky objects. Comes in different versions, such as an unbound field edition with white stars on a black background ($30), and a full-color desktop edition ($50)
, by Tirion, Rappaport and Lovi, in two volumes, is a much more detailed atlas with a total of 473 charts, 332,000 stars with some as faint as 9.5 magnitude and more than 10,000 deep sky objects. Each volume of Uranometria costs $50.