City astrophotography

Hi @petro62 

I live in the same conditions, surrounded by small buildings and with streetlamps everywhere (suburbs of Paris).

Good news is : you can definitely do astrophotography !

The easiest way to start, in my opinion, even with modest gear (check my page : almost everything was done with a iOptron Skyguider : https://www.astrobin.com/users/JO_FR_94/), is to use narrowband filters on emission nebulas. These filters let only pass the lights around certain wavelength specific to ionised gas (hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen and a few others, but those are the magic 3 as most nebulas you can easily observe are made of them), and they filter out any other source of lights. With sufficient subexposure time, getting nice results is really straightforward.

But with patience and lots of hours you can tackle other objects in broadband spectrum light, like galaxies. Again check my page to see what you can get on that under bortle 8.

You can also check these groups here, dedicated to this topic, and see what is achievable :
https://www.astrobin.com/groups/153/
https://www.astrobin.com/groups/24/

See U !

Hi Petro62,

no problem. )) I live quite near the centre of a town with 100.000 inhabitants and my sky always is around SQM 17.5  / Bortle 7 ... and it works! Take a look on my portfolio here: https://www.astrobin.com/users/Gotthard/collections/  I prefer small and faint galaxies, so I use a simple DSLR and NO filters. 

Don't hesitate and give it a try!

Best wishes, stay save and always Cbortle8S

Gotthard

Hi @petro62, go for it. I live under a bortle 8 sky with an international airport just across the water, I have no real issues. It’s more ideal to have darker sky’s but AP is absolutely possible. 

If you are starting out I suggest using your dslr and lense as a starter. You’ll start to understand what is required. You can check out YouTube with the likes of  Nico Carver (channel - nebula photos), he has done a ton of stuff using a very basic setup. You’ll be better informed and it will cost less in the long run.

IF you are going to spend, get a good mount and tripod that will allow you to scale as you get better with more understanding of AP.

Good luck and clear skies 
Brad

@petro62 if I am not mistaken, the Celestron 6se has a built in alt azimuth mount, correct ? It may follow the stars or other objects, but you have field rotation in this case, and therefore you cannot do long exposures (at least without a field rotator that cancel out the field rotation). I am not sure if you already bought an equatorial mount - you were talking about a skywatcher one ? - but this is what you need to have long exposures : with these mounts, your rotation axis is parallel to the one of the earth, and therefore, turning at the same angular speed, everything stays put on your sensor (a bit of drift if you do not guide, but negligible at shorter focal ratios. With alt-azimuth mount, the star or object you point stays in the middle of the frame, but rotate on itself. 
Of course, you can do short exposures to avoid having trails or elongated stars.  If you look at @Nico Carver  videos, you will see it is possible to do without all of that provided you do only short exposures : instead of doing a hundreds of 1 minutes exposures and stack them, you have to do thousands and stack them. But that works with low f/ ratio, otherwise you don’t have enough light to even register your images (you need to have a good bunch of stars to align them before stacking). And the longer you focal length is, the shorter exposure time must be before you see star trails... with the Celestron 6SE, you have a very long focal length (1500mm). It is not made for deep sky objects astrophotography, because at f/12, you need tons of time to start to to see something. So to use it for that purpose, you will need a motorized equatorial mount at least, and maybe a focal reducer to decrease the f/ ratio (more light on each pixel thanks to a wider fov).
Maybe you can use Nico tricks with your mount with very very short exposure and very very bright nebulas, like Orion that one can see with its naked eyes when it is very dark. And maybe Andromeda (though with 1500mm, it won’t fit your field of you, that’s way bigger !).
Install Stellarium - free software - on your computer, it has a nice functionality to help you frame your shots : you can enter the focal length of your telescope and sensor size, and it draw a frame of your field of view on the sky map. Plus, it gives you the magnitud of what you want to shoot : the lower the number, the higher the « luminosity », so that you can pick bright objects (star clusters ? Orion... etc.).
Definitely, a lense on your DSLR, from 8mm up to 200mm FL, and f/ ratio between 2 and 4 depending on aberrations of specific lenses, would be a better starter than the 6SE that will be much more demanding in total time of exposure and gear to get a proper guiding...
Lots of APers that use DSLR and low budget gear have a sweet spot on 135mm f/4. 
I hope this helps a bit

I image from my 6th floor balcony/terrace in the central district of a major German city (Bortle 7/8 ). As others pointed out you can get decent results, but lots of exposure time and good image calibration is the key. This is no full substitution for a dark sky though, the images will always lag behind the results you would achieve if you imaged from under dark skies, especially broadband. Narrowband works quite well.

Have a look at my gallery, many images were taken from the city.

The 6SE is actually very good for planetary (which also includes lunar). The technique is radically different though, you record video and stack e.g. with Registax. In all likelihood you can get very decent results even with just your phone, simply mount (or hold) the camera lens over the eyepiece where your eye would normally go. 


May I ask, exactly what configuration did you use the other night? Was it the Canon with its own lens piggy-backed on top of the telescope, or you tried to use the telescope as lens?