Impressive celestial photography is a lot more feasible for amateurs now than it was a generation ago. But good results still require a willingness to learn the intricacies of cameras, focusing techniques, exposure times, films, and miscellaneous equipment. In particular, taking deep-sky pictures requires a skill that's involved in no other kind of photography: guiding on a star.

WHY GUIDE?

To get a sharp image from a long exposure, you must keep a guidestar centered on cross hairs for the entire time the shutter is open -- from a few minutes to an hour or more. While watching the star, you frequently need to adjust the telescope's aim a bit to keep the image motionless on the film.

No telescope drive, no matter how well made, can eliminate the need for guiding. Any gear system contains some *periodic error* that shifts the telescope back and forth slightly in right ascension, typically with a period of 4, 8, or 15 minutes. If the telescope is not perfectly polar aligned it will probably drift slightly in declination too. The telescope tube may flex a little as it tracks the subject across the sky. Atmospheric refraction varies as an object's altitude changes, altering the object's apparent position enough to blur photographs after as little as a few minutes. The electricity running the drive motor may be slightly irregular. And the slowest component of atmospheric "seeing," or turbulence, can make a whole star field creep around slightly with a characteristic time of many seconds. You have to guide the telescope on a star to follow all of these motions.

The aiming corrections required are so tiny -- just a few arcseconds -- that you cannot push the telescope by hand. Instead you need an electronic *drive corrector* that speeds or slows the telescope's drive motor. This allows fine guiding in right ascension (east-west), where the most frequent corrections are needed.

You also need a fine-motion control in declination (north-south). A turn-by-hand control will work only if the mounting is rigid enough so it doesn't wiggle at high power when you turn the knob. An electric declination motor usually gives much better results. Typically the buttons or joystick for controlling both right ascension and declination are mounted on a hand paddle.

GETTING STARTED

The first thing you need to do is polar align your mount. This means aligning the right-ascension axis parallel to the Earth's axis of rotation. Otherwise, even with perfect guiding, everything in the photograph will circle slightly around your guidestar, a problem known as field rotation.

How much polar alignment do you need? That depends on the exposure time and image scale of the picture you are taking. Wide-field photography with a normal (50-millimeter) camera lens requires minimal alignment. Simply pointing the mount's polar axis at Polaris as best as you can judge is usually enough for normal-lens exposures of a few minutes.

When you start using longer lenses or a telescope, you need better alignment. Some mounts come with a *polar alignment finder,* a miniature telescope with an engraved reticle that you position on Polaris and surrounding stars. These devices work quickly and well. If you want the best possible alignment, however, especially for a permanently mounted telescope, use the *declination drift method* described in the box below. It takes a little time, but it's simple and needs no special equipment. Nothing else gets you closer to the celestial pole.

PIGGYBACK PHOTOGRAPHY

The easiest way to enter the realm of deep-sky astrophotography is by the piggyback method. Simply attach a camera to the side of the telescope, point skyward, and open the shutter. You guide the camera by tracking on a star seen in the telescope.

Piggyback photography puts the least demands on your guiding ability. Most piggyback photographers start with a normal or a wide-angle lens (such as 28 mm) that will capture whole constellations at once. Almost any camera lens has a much shorter focal length than the telescope, so the image scale is much smaller. This means you can make numerous small guiding mistakes without affecting the photograph. Piggybacking provides just the type of practice you need to gain experience for other, more difficult forms of astrophotography.

GUIDING EYEPIECES

What kind of eyepiece do you need for watching the guidestar? For piggyback guiding you can try a plain high-power eyepiece with no cross hairs or reticle. Simply rack a bright guidestar far out of focus until it almost fills the field of view. Any substantial drift will be easily visible, allowing you to recenter the star.

For photography at longer focal lengths, you need an eyepiece with an illuminated reticle or cross hairs. Dozens of guiding eyepieces are on the market, and many perform other functions as well. What do you really need?

Some people feel that the best design is still the old-fashioned cross hairs. Any motion is revealed when the star emerges from behind their intersection. Some astrophotographers like to keep the star in view, tucked adjacent to the intersection. If you use a double or dual cross hair, the guidestar can be placed at any of the four intersection points or defocused to nearly fill the small central square.

Another approach is to use an eyepiece reticle with concentric circles, each denoting a different guiding tolerance. If you can keep the star inside the appropriate circle, you know that all is well. For this approach to work, however, you have to know the guiding tolerance for your particular photographic setup and which circle on the reticle this corresponds to. Guiding tolerances are usually very tight, so most astrophotographers simply prefer to guide as accurately as they possibly can and hope it's good enough.

One often overlooked approach is AstronomyOutreach Networkion reticle. This device superposes a reticle's image onto the view in an ordinary eyepiece. Some designs have a 3X Barlow lens built in to allow the use of medium-power eyepieces that have comfortable eye relief. Another advantage is that the reticle's image can be moved around the field to align on a guidestar; you don't have to move the whole telescope to the star. This allows more flexibility in aiming and composing your photographs.

Reticle illuminators today are a vast improvement over the incandescent bulbs with their tangles of wires that were the rule in the past. Today's standard illuminator is a dim, red LED (light-emitting diode) that draws only a little current from a small battery that's right inside the eyepiece unit itself. The brightness should be adjustable so you can set it to the best level for any guidestar. One of the latest and greatest improvements is the blinking LED, which gives you alternate views of the guidestar with and without the cross hairs. This allows much fainter stars to be used for guiding.

THROUGH THE TELESCOPE

When it comes to deep-sky photography through a telescope, you have two choices: using a separate guidescope or an off-axis guider.

A *guidescope* attaches to the main telescope via mounting rings that allow it to be aimed independently to some degree. This lets you choose any guidestar up to a couple of degrees from the field being photographed. As a rule of thumb, the guidescope should have about as long a focal length as the telescope you are photographing through. It should also have a reasonably large aperture. Such a guidescope is a substantial instrument in its own right, adding a lot to the whole setup's cost, size, weight, and demands on the mounting.

Guidescopes have another problem: flexure. During an exposure the guidescope must not bend, shift, or otherwise change orientation with respect to the main telescope's optical axis. Neither can anything in the main telescope bend or shift. Otherwise stars will come out elongated, double, or irregular even when you guide perfectly.

For such reasons the guidescope has been largely eclipsed in the last 20 years by the *off-axis guider.* This device allows you to look through the main telescope at the same time you're photographing through it.

Off-axis guiders generally use a little "pick-off" prism to divert a small part of the image to the guiding eyepiece. The pick-off prism is near or outside the edge of the camera frame, so its shadow has little or no effect on the photograph. You maneuver the prism around to find a good guidestar before starting the exposure. Alternatively, some guiders use a full-aperture window called a pellicle that transmits most of the light to the film while reflecting 10 or 20 percent to the eyepiece.

At long focal lengths, off-axis guiding gives the best results. The starlight you see in the eyepiece goes through the same optical assembly, by and large, as the light going to the film, so tube flexure ceases to be an issue. If it happens you just guide it out.

There are, however, a few inconveniences to consider. Finding a guidestar can be tough, because the area of the field accessible to the pick-off prism is limited. The guiding eyepiece extends out at a 90-degree angle to the light path of the telescope, and to find a good star you may have to rotate the eyepiece holder around the optical axis to an inconvenient angle. (Some new off-axis guiders allow the eyepiece holder to be rotated independently of the camera.)

Whether you use a guidescope or an off-axis guider, photography through a telescope requires that you work with very high power. The rule of thumb is to use a magnification about five times the telescope's focal length in inches. Thus, with an 8-inch f/10 Schmidt-Cassegrain (focal length 80 inches), try guiding at about 400X. In an off-axis guider, a 9- or 12-mm eyepiece with a 2X Barlow lens will always be about right, no matter what your telescope. GUIDING TECHNIQUE

Get comfortable, center the guidestar, and take a couple of minutes to practice before opening the shutter.

Astrophotographers generally align their cross hairs north-south and east-west, parallel to the motions of the equatorial mount. This makes it easy to see the corrections to make. However, if you're guiding on a faint star you may prefer to orient the cross hairs 45 degrees to these directions. This way, as soon as the star begins to drift it will move into open space rather than remain hidden behind a cross hair.

If you have a four-button hand controller, hold it in the same orientation as east-west and north-south in the eyepiece so you won't have to think about which button to push. If the north-south buttons work right but the east-west buttons are reversed, turn the paddle over to orient them correctly. In this case you'll have to press the buttons from underneath.

Declination drives are notorious for having a little loose play -- a "dead zone" -- where nothing happens for a couple of seconds whenever you reverse direction. A trick to get around this problem is to unbalance the scope slightly; this way its weight stays hanging on one side of the dead zone. Another trick is to set the polar alignment slightly east or west of the true pole. This creates a very slow declination drift, but it will always be in the same direction, so you'll never have to reverse direction. Just don't misalign so much that you get field rotation.

In many telescopes, especially commercial Schmidt-Cassegrains, the optics themselves have a certain amount of play. The primary mirror, especially in large-aperture scopes, can sometimes make a sudden shift after the telescope crosses the meridian. This "mirror flop" may be so large that you can't guide it out, and you end up with doubled or tailed stars. To keep this from happening, start your exposure after the subject has crossed the meridian or finish before it gets there.

AUTOGUIDERS

It sounds almost too good to be true: a robotic device that watches the guidestar and adjusts your telescope automatically, with a machine's tireless precision, while you relax. It's no pipe dream; this is part of the CCD revolution that's beginning to sweep amateur astronomy. A CCD (charge-coupled device) records images electronically and sends them to a computer, which is rigged to drive the right ascension and declination motors. An autoguider can use a modest, low-cost CCD, making this capability affordable.

Some CCD cameras themselves have a "track and accumulate" function that allows them to take many short exposures, then stack them by computer with the best possible fit to create one long exposure. This can sometimes eliminate the need for guiding. Some advanced CCD cameras now include *two* CCD chips -- a small one to autoguide the telescope and a bigger, better one to record the image.

We've come a long way from the days when amateur astrophotography was restricted to committed tinkerers with machine shops, darkrooms, and whole nights to spend attempting to make things work. Astro imaging has opened up to anyone willing to buy the gear and take the time to gain skills using it. And now the day has arrived when, once set up, you can literally sleep through the whole thing!

SIDEBAR: Simple, Accurate Polar Alignment

The declination-drift method is the most accurate way to line up your telescope on the celestial pole. The method is straightforward but does require some time and patience.

First aim the mount's polar axis roughly at Polaris. Now point the telescope at a star within 5 degrees or so of the celestial equator and as close to south as you can judge by looking directly opposite Polaris. Put in a high-power eyepiece. If the eyepiece has cross hairs, center the star on them. Otherwise put the star on the north or south edge of the field and defocus it a little. Turn on the clock drive, and ignore any east-west drift.

If the star drifts *south* in the eyepiece, the polar axis is pointing *too far east.*

If the star drifts *north,* the polar axis is *too far west.*

Shift the polar axis left or right accordingly, until there is no more drift.

Now aim at a star that's near the celestial equator low in the eastern sky.

If the star drifts *south,* the polar axis points *too low.*

If the star drifts *north,* the polar axis points *too high.*

Again, shift the polar axis accordingly.

Now go back and repeat from the beginning, because each adjustment throws the previous one slightly off. When all visible drift is eliminated the telescope is very accurately aligned, and you can take long deep-sky exposures.

If your eastern sky is blocked, you can use a star low in the west and reverse the words "too high" and "too low" in the instructions. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, reverse "north" and "south."

Fig. 1 -- BIG COLOR PRINT OF GALAXY NGC 6946.

Amateur astrophotographs that would have been unbelievable a generation ago are now possible with new films, equipment, and techniques. But one demand of celestial photography remains the same: guiding the telescope throughout the exposure. Tony and Daphne Hallas used a Celestron 14 telescope with a telecompressor to get a focal length of 102 inches for this image of the galaxy NGC 6946 on the Cepheus-Cygnus border. They took two 60-minute exposures on hypered Super HG 400 film, then sandwiched them to make prints. The smallest star images here are 2 to 3 arcseconds across -- many times smaller than the telescope's tracking errors, which were guided out by an ST-4 autoguider. The frame is just under 1/2 degree wide, and north is to the upper left.

Fig. 2 -- BIG COLOR PRINT OF COCOON NEBULA.

Tony and Daphne Hallas photographed the Cocoon Nebula, IC 5146 in Cygnus, using the same equipment and procedures as for the photograph of NGC 6946. The pictures are reproduced at the same scale; the smallest stars here appear hardly more than 1 arcsecond wide. North is to the upper left.

Fig. 3 -- SLIDE BY DENNIS DI CICCO OF A CAMERA SLUNG UNDER THE TUBE OF A C-11.

Piggyback photography, in which a camera and its lens ride on a motor-driven telescope, is the most foolproof way to begin taking beautiful astrophotos. You get a wide field and small image scale on the film along with a large, powerful "guidescope." A ball-head accessory aids in orienting the camera to frame constellations regardless of the telescope's position.

Fig. 4 -- COLOR PRINT OF PAIR OF SCOPES.

A successful guidescope arrangement. George Vlahakis of Yakima, Washington, uses a 3 1/4-inch f/11 guidescope while taking pictures with a 5-inch f/8 AstroPhysics refractor. The focal length of the guidescope nearly matches that of the main instrument. On the back of the guidescope an ST-4 CCD autoguider runs the drive controls, performing the functions of a human eye and hand.

Fig. 5 -- SLIDE BY DENNIS DI CICCO OF CAMERA WITH ATTACHMENT.

An off-axis guider on a camera. The guider consists of a wide tube that goes between the camera and telescope with a smaller tube coming out its side. A small "pick-off" prism diverts starlight from the edge of the field (*off* the optical *axis*) and sends it to the guiding eyepiece at upper right. The wire supplies power to light the eyepiece cross hairs. *Sky & Telescope* photograph by Dennis di Cicco.

Fig. 6a and 6b -- TWO SLIDES BY DENNIS OF WAVY LINES. RAGGED LINES FIRST, SMOOTHER LINES SECOND.

This is what happens with no guiding. Periodic error in the telescope's drive and gear train inevitably moves the telescope back and forth slightly in right ascension. To record this motion, Dennis di Cicco aimed the telescope's polar axis east of the pole, causing the star to trail southward in declination as it oscillated in right ascension. By tinkering with the gear train of this homemade drive, he was able to remove most of the troublesome fast irregularities in the trails *(left)*, leaving just the smoother periodic error of the main worm gear *(right).* The latter is easier to guide out. The oscillations amount to about 30 arcseconds, typical for today's commercial telescope drives that do not have electronic periodic-error correction (PEC).

Fig. 7 -- SLIDE BY STEVE EDBERG OF M8.

Piggyback photography gives fine results for large deep-sky objects, especially if you want to show them in the context of their surrounding star fields. Steven Edberg of La Canada, California, used a 5 1/2-inch f/3.64 reflector, focal length 508 mm, piggybacked on a 5-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope for this image of the Lagoon Nebula, M8, in the rich Milky Way of Sagittarius. This is a 5-minute exposure on 3M 1000 film.