A Decent Beverage to End the Week
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Manna..?
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The Ghostly Light of the Pleiades
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Oh, Halloween. What a fun holiday! Kids, costumes and candy. Spooky-scary fun for all!
I know some folks get uptight about this Holiday, relating it to Devil Worship, for the narrow-minded or at best, Paganism. Pfft. Its an astronomical holiday! Sure, it relates back to the festival of Samhain in Celt and Druidic culture. If you think about it, many of our holidays or customs relate back to such festivals and traditions. Heck the date of Christmas itself probably relates back to Saturnalia. Jesus wasn't born on December 25th.
Most holidays, when you think about it are astronomical in origin, as they related to the Solstices or other astronomical movements. Without "America's Got Talent", "Dancing with the Stars" and Daily (Bad) News Broadcasts, folks spent much more time watching the sky than most of us.
Building tales around the movement and stories of the objects in the sky was a thing in those days. As I understand one story behind the Pleiades is that they were seven sisters. One day the Hunter Orion noticed them and drunk with lust pursued them across the countryside for 7 years. Eventually Zeus took pity on them, transforming them into doves and nestling them safely in the sky out of Orion's grasp.
Halloween is the night that the ghostly blue sisters culminate to their highest point in the sky, at midnight.
Wishing you and yours a safe and fun Halloween!
The Serpent Fountain
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I don't know about you.. but when I'm in the garden and a serpent comes up and starts talking to me about tasty fruit from some tree, I get my shovel.
Zapped
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The Last Time I will Moon you in October
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Been trying to work out the tracking contrast / profile on my guide scope camera, so that it can track under the light pollution of an illuminated moon.
The result is, as you can tell, lots of moony-ness. :)
NEO Astrophotography Experiment - The Moon as Seen by an iPhone 6, Lumia 1020 and A7r
/This is very subjective. Of those below, which image do you prefer?
The moon, as seen by the Sony A7R in Cassegrain Focus
(Click here for Full Res)
The moon, as seen by the Lumia 1020 through Eyepiece Projection
(Click here for Full Res)
The moon, as seen by the iPhone 6 in Eyepiece Projection
(Click here for Full Res)This mostly applies to near-earth-object photography, the moon, planets, etc. Deep Sky Photography is a different endeavor, as previously mentioned: http://www.graffitivisuals.com/blog/2014/9/1/astrophotography-that-mortals-can-understand
I decided to embark on a very unscientific experiment last week. When I stepped up the primary optical tube a couple months ago, I decided I'd sell my trusty Meade ETX 125 but I'd send it off to have it serviced, first.
It returned last week from a thorough cleaning and inspection and I took it out for one-last-dance to make sure everything is Kosher with it before listing it for sale on Craigslist.
(In fact it is still for sale at the time of this post, anyway.)
http://mobile.craigslist.org/ele/4702647753.html
But, I digress, this is not a commercial :)
So, the experiment was simple: Of these few available imaging gadgets, when paired with the Meade ETX 125 which grabbed the best images of the Waxing Gibbous moon?
First, the A7R.. So, the A7r *should* have had a tremendous advantage over the other two methods, simply by being in Cassegrain Focus (shooting prime through the telescope instead of through an eyepiece) and by being a generally kick-ass camera.
But, it really didn't 'kill it'. I think a bit of this relates to shutter curtain shake with the A7r when mounted on this smaller telescope. At preview-size it seems sharp but at full-resolution, you can see some softness, especially in the craters along the bottom-right. Surprisingly, the f15 shot isn't consistently sharp across the frame, which could very well be the small aperture of the telescope but was a surprising result (to me, anyway) nonetheless. EFCS (Electronic First Curtain Shutter) would have prevented this softness most likely.
Still, I'm not hating on the A7r. It is still by far the best camera I've ever used (for my types of photography.)
Next, the Lumia 1020. The Lumia 1020 *should* also have some powerful advantages. The 38 effective megapixels, RAW image capability and manual controls in the software and lack of shutter curtain shake *should* make it the stand-out winner.
I must admit that I really can't stand the Nokia Camera App on Windows 8.x. Whenever people try to represent a dial-based interface on a touch screen, it seems to turn out bad.
So, aside from hating the user interface, the Lumia 1020 did give me a nice chunky .dng RAW file to work with. Still, the Lumia 1020 also seems to loose definition in the craters, even at preview-image sizes and it creates noisy images. I would be apt to blame some of these shortcomings on the smaller telescope tube but it isn't the tube, it is some combination of sensor and file-processing.
(these RAW images were not tweaked in Lightroom aside from cropping)
Finally, the iPhone 6. I will freely admit that when an Apple executive stands on stage and does a keynote, describing advances in photography with terms like "more photons!" or "now with focus pixels" that my general response is, "What the heck is a focus pixel?" and I throw popcorn at the monitor. But hey, those people at the fruit-company do make some nice things.
The straight JPEG out of the iPhone is my favorite of this group. The bits that need clarity and definition (the craters) have it while the bits that need smoothness and uniformity, have it. Of course, that super-low expanded ISO doesn't hurt.
The iOS camera app hides the manual features but still gives you the power to do timer-based shooting, batches of shots and makes exposure compensation easy enough. I wish it gave me a RAW file but that isn't in Apple's philosophy.
... Of course this wasn't a purely scientific approach in that different ISO is used, some were RAW and one was JPEG. Different exposure times were even used and then there is the whole camera shake bit.
But, in an anecdotal test of being out with the telescope and wondering, "hey which one of these will be best suited for near-earth-object astrophotography?", I was a little surprised by the results, personally.
Which result would YOU choose?
Footprints on the Beach
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I was cleaning out my Lumia 1020 camera roll and ran across this from earlier in the summer. It's like finding a quarter in the laundry!
The Coming Squirrel-pocalypse
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Like any war, someone had to fire the first shot. In the war of the Dodd family versus the squirrels, the squirrels fired first.
It was more than a shot, heard 'round the neighborhood, it was an invasion.
They came in from all sides, unexpectedly. At first, we were not sure of their intentions until they struck. it started with a pool-net and quickly progressed to other summer-time toys in the yard.
Their appetite for destruction was like a dark wave that passed over our community in the hot September evenings.
As they began to walk the gutter-line seeking the breach the attic perimeter, something had to be done. At last we decided to fight back. In the end it was about hearts-and-minds, about propaganda.
I sighted in the scope on my Ruger Talon .177 pellet gun. It had been years since I had brandished the weapon in shooting sports with the Boy Scouts but it came back to me quickly. Frankly I was pleasantly surprised in the accuracy @ 50 yards on par with my .223 AR15 and the recoil even less than my 9mm HK94 MP5.
(Those other weapons seemed a bit of overkill, however.)
A 11" x 14" target was left near the picnic table. Riddled with holes, it left a clear message that this destruction would not be tolerated.
This weekend, the squirrel nation sent an emissary to negotiate a lasting peace. While negotiations are ongoing, we are hopeful this bitter conflict will come to an end before lives are lost.
:)
Horsehead Nebula
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This is what the Horsehead Nebula looked like, 1,500 years ago (from last weekend).
I wonder what it looks like now?
Imagine there were habitable planets around any of these stars with intelligent species with the capability to look into the stars. If they looked at the third planet from our star and saw our ancestors from 1,500 years ago, what would they think of us?
The Mayans were doing well for themselves but brutal sacrifice and inequality were a cultural norm.
The people of Constantinople would be rioting about now, the result of a blockade by a Byzantine General, Vitalian.
Christendom is at war with Islam and in some smaller clashes, at war with itself. The formerly Roman provinces of Britain begins to be divided among Anglo-Saxon Warlords in the beginnings of their Feudal Periods.
If the inhabitants of a planet, circling a star within the Horsehead Nebula could see us from their world, they would have seen Human Sacrifice, War, Famine and conquests driven by religious ideology.
1,000 years before the Renaissance, humans were even bigger assholes than we are today.. It wasn’t our finest hour.
Still by this Period, Ancient India had gotten pretty good at Astronomy and early philosophers had started to figure some things out based on observation. 1000 years before Giordano Bruno, folks were still regarding the points of light in our sky with supernatural wonder.
I'm still learning the ropes and dealing with technical problems with my secondhand QHY imager. This was made through 4 5 minute exposures with a manual filter wheel, Baader Planetarium 2" Filters. I calibrated them with 3 dozen calibration frames of equal exposure.
At some point during the process, the temperature wasn't holding very well on the imager, so I started getting anomalous heat-related inconsistencies that I tried to smooth in Lightroom.
Night / Fair
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Baldwin County's Fair is in Town
This year they appear to have gone with a new Amusement Vendor. I was always quite partial to the layout of the old fair from a stuff-photography perspective. It was dark and made for fun long exposure shots of rides. The placement of the rides made it easy to get great shots..
That being said, this year's fair-company seems different in some ways that I believe fair-goers will appreciate. For one, the grounds are considerably brighter, which makes for a safer-feeling environment. I noticed handheld photography was quite possible as reasonable ISO settings.
One huge improvement - I didn't notice cables pulled everywhere along the grounds like I have with previous years.
I think I struggled a bit this year finding cool shots while we walked around but I think all things considered fair-goers seemed to enjoy the new digs.
I do miss the photography opportunities of the gigantic rope-swing-thing, though.
..And as you can see I did take a little time to Fly around the grounds to get some aerial video. I normally don't fly our camera drones in potentially crowded spots.
I have plenty of confidence in my ability to fly it reliably but I do not wish to in any way contribute to the hyperbole associated with camera / quad copters in the public eye.
If you notice, I chose a rather unpopulated time to do the aerial work.
Plus I never actually flew directly over the fair / so no chance of a crashing quad interfering with ride safety.
Delta, Aerial September Sunset
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It was a crazy nice day out today. I knew that after dinner I would be stuck with a few more hours of work / not able to go out and play but I thought at least I could send one of the flying monkeys up to catch the sunset on my behalf :)
Happy Fall!
Go Outside, Look Up
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I don't think we do this enough. Just go outside and look up (especially at night).
On this our first night of autumnal equinox, our first night of fall, the humidity is lower and it's quite comfortable out. When I was a kid, we grew up on ten acres amidst a forestry in Indiana.
The phone-quality for my 300 baud modem wasn't so hot but our night skies were pretty epic. So epic, in fact many of my parent's friends swore to have had a number of 'close encounters' with other-worldly beings in flying frisbees. It freaked me out a little but I also kinda realized they were on drugs. So, there's that, too.
When we moved in Alabama, it isn't that our skies are all that different but our small subdivision had plenty of light pollution from the surrounding neighborhoods and near by football stadium. Not the place to stargaze.
(But, the modem speeds were faster! - a whopping 14,400kps if I disabled error correction. (ATN0 on my USR Dual Standard modem - not the full 28,800 but a good speed, nonetheless)
We built a small house on 2 acres with significantly improved skies. Then, a neighborhood came to occupy the 40 acre farmland across the street. Some good folks moved in (at first) but the stargazing did diminish.
At our current place, the lots are about an Acre with plenty of trees. To the South is a retail area, Bass Pro Shops and some Malls. To the North, not much but other neighborhoods, lots of hills and plenty of Civil War history. So, as I go out on the back deck and look up, tonight, I'm happy to see what is pictured here. A pretty decent night sky!
I can get by with Planetary imaging here. For deep sky stuff, the objects need to be high in the sky and towards the North or I will need to go camping.
Which brings me to my question. What's your favorite stargazing site? Is it somewhere that won't mind the presence of my tent and telescopes this winter?
Delta Sunshine
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At one point, last year around this time, I had three drones. They were named Alvin, Simon and Theodore. ;)
Alvin(a heavily modified Phantom), went for a swim in the bay towards the left side of this shot, Simon (A FlameWheel 550 HexRotor) found a new owner on eBay.
That leaves Theodore, who so far has been quite the trusty little quadcopter :) 30 minute flight time, FPV Goggles makes filming an enjoyable experience.
I'm not really thrilled with flying any of these around people, so I'm excited that the summer-tourist season is over and take back to the air.
I found one other, sort of silly use for Theodore. I was flying down the gutter-lines of the house to see if they needed to be clean. The prop-wash effectively removed all of the loose debris in the gutters.
.. Gutter cleaning by drone. I can see the hyperbolic news cycle, now..
Beach Day
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Had a nice time in Orange Beach & Gulf Shores today with the family. It had been too long since we had last made our way to the epic beaches in Orange Beach.
(Since I don't work in Orange Beach anymore, I have less opportunity to spend time on the beaches with my cameras.)
Speaking of cameras. This is that silly little iPhone 6 camera again. I have to say, for a camera on a phone, it is quite an impressive combination of software and hardware.
The burst mode, is a parents dream. The built-in in-camera app editing features have gotten much stronger since I was last in the IOS camp, as well.
Staring at the Sun
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I imagine for the early people on our rock, the change of seasons and the movement of the sun, moon and stars across the sky really was quite scary.
No one told them not to stare in the sun, at least not formally, they just somehow knew - maybe through experience, that it was a bad idea.
No sunscreen but I suppose sufficient quantity of mud and leaves provided a high enough SPF level to prevent burns on some.
Meanwhile, the sun seemingly flopped back and fourth through the sky day after day, unaware that the silly people on the 3rd planet had anthropomorphized it into some kind of vengeful deity that was hungry for sacrifice.
What's a giant plasma ball of hydrogen and helium gonna do?
Astrophotography that Mortals Can Understand
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This image was captured between August 28th and September 1st and it cost me under $100 from start to finish. Really. :)
I will freely admit that I'm no astronomer. I have a college-level astronomy book on my desk that I've attempted to read four times. Each time, I'm asleep in my chair in the first pages.
But that's how I am. I learn by doing, anyway.
(I'm not sure if learning-by-doing is more or less expensive than the college approach, my experiments have been costly!)
The first time that I put my eye to a telescope, I remember it well. There was nothing in the eyepiece. I was youngish and the adult I was with, who set up the telescope was cussing, frustrated that we just couldn't seem to see anything with the thing. He put it in the closet and started to frustratedly suck down a cigarette and complain. We didn't tried again with that 'scope.
Then, as an adult, I broke down and bought a used telescope (an Orion 8inch Newtonian Reflector). It was about the size of a cannon and it came with a small treasure trove of accessories, (and no instructions) and so I had no idea what I was doing. But, I did get it pointed to some easy stuff.
The moon. Jupiter. Saturn. Orion Nebula.
I wasn't very smart about it. Like, with the moon. I just kept staring at it, unfiltered. You know, that the moon-glow is a reflection of the Sun and the sun can blind you, right? Little blue bars floated in and out of my vision for days.
The one that struck me the most, was Saturn. Those rings absolutely capture the imagination. I thought two things:
"I really need to show this to people!" and "I want to go there!'
.. and that's how you get into Astrophotography. To fulfill that 1st impulse of trying to find some way to capture what you see in the eyepiece in a way that can be easily shared.
The problem, as I see it, is that Astronomy is entirely too close to rocket science in terms of complexity. Especially astro-photography.
In "True Bill Fashion", I put my wallet before my brain and started ordering stuff. The first bit was a solar system imager from Orion, a GoTo Conversion system for my Orion Mount and a bunch of adapters that never seemed to work correctly. In fact, you could say none if it really worked right. I had duct tape (literally) folded as wedges to align the camera to look into the eyepiece (that is called eyepiece-projection).
I did still get some pretty-cool images, though, albeit at a low resolution.
About a decade has gone by and I'm still no astronomer. But I have figured some things out and technology and product offerings have evolved to make our astro-photography aspirations easier. I'm still working on the "I really need to show this to people!" part, maybe I can get to the "I want to go there!" part in a couple years.. :)
I will not be getting super-ultra-technical here. I'm just going to cover some fundamentals and what I've found works for capturing images of the awesome things in our night sky.
Want to make astro-images? You basically have two options.
Buy a bunch of stuff
or
Rent
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Rentals
Part Robot, Part Telescope.
A couple years ago I was involved in this marketing project and was asked to produce an image of a Galaxy (any Galaxy), something with an unlimited use commercial license. I think it went up as some wall-hanger in an airport with some cheesy slogan for a product,, "A Galaxy of Options." or some crap.
I didn't have access to an appropriate deep-sky telescope and didn't have the $5k built into the budget to come up with everything I needed in a hurry. I found this guy in Europe with an Observatory and Imaging gear, via an Astronomy forum. For a small fee, he allowed me to VNC (remote control) into his Observatory PC and run the imager from remote. The imager had a 3 megapixel array and I ended up shooting about 100 + frames, combining them all into a stacker to get the resolution I needed for print. It worked well! (Well, I guess it did. I got paid.)
So, that's what Renting usually looks like. Instead of the borrow-lenses approach of getting a lens in the mail, renting a telescope usually involves renting observatory time, either local or remotely controlled. It is because the capabilities of the mount are as important as the optics of the scope and these mounts aren't easily shippable.
Within 300 miles of me there are about a half-dozen observatories, most built by universities. Most, you can get some time with even if you aren't a student. Only a few of those have research-grade deep sky equipment and imaging configurations. A few are 'observe only' and none of them really let you bring a camera to pair up with b/c of the delicate balance configuration on the mounts.
Still, a couple in Alabama are in somewhat light-polluted areas and the telescope of the observatory in Northern Alabama is of less quality than that which you can pick up on Craigslist for less than $1k.
So, for me the option is more between remotely controlling better equipment for imaging or using my own. There are a couple services out there to provide this and even individual observatories can often accommodate this.
One cool service, used to be called Global-Rent-A-Scope. Which, I guess is now called iTelescope.Net. With iTelescope.Net you can browse available telescopes and connect to them in real-time through a simple-enough web interface.
You get a view of the available telescopes, their condition and location amongst the dark side of the earth.
It's really just as simple as clicking one, submitting an imaging job and picking your TiFF files up from an FTP site. The service allows you to reserve a telescope, pre-define imaging runs and execute those imaging runs as 'jobs'. You can monitor the status and the billing seems to be quite fair.
Each telescope has it's own host on the itelescope.net domain and an easy-enough http interface from which you can submit imaging jobs and monitor their status.
Telescopes are billed by varied rates per imaging hour. You only pay for your imaging time, so the time it takes for the telescope to slew to a location and do imaging setup isn't included. They manage profiles containing the capabilities of the individual telescopes so that you can pick the right tool for the job. In fact, picking from the smorgasbord of awesome offerings is way harder than the actual imaging!
They sell subscriptions with a base number of imaging-points included and offer the ability to purchase another points.
Why is it a subscription? Well, if you think about it, you will be in and out of their servers quite a bit before-or-after your actual imaging run, so this small subscription rate covers the usage of their servers and the storage of your image data. I've found the billing arrangement to be very fair and you can cancel at any time. I even had a job go wrong (the telescope used the wrong filter) and a simple request form and they refunded the points used without question.
Example pricing at the time of this article, I shot 5 frames of Andromeda @ 10 minutes per frame. That came out to be about $60 to produce the one image. Considering you are getting control of a $100k research-grade telescope and imager, it's a good deal.
There are other services, as well. Slooh.Com, Bradford Robotic Telescope and others. Check the one you choose for the image-use rights and resolution that meets your needs.
iTelescope.net met my needs.
If you still think that's too much, consider what it would cost you to do it yourself, with lesser-gear.. You can, but even the cheaper routes,... aren't cheap..
Buy a Bunch of Stuff
Because, my next home will be purchased entirely on American Express Reward Points.
In the (inner) Solar System? That's easy!
So, what you need depends on what you want to do. If you want to photograph inner solar-system objects, pretty much any decent telescope and mount will do. To alleviate frustration, I would recommend something with a GoTo - or equivalent -mount. (The little handheld dealio that finds objects in the sky for you!) The Meade ETX 125 Schmidt-Cassegrain served me well for years. One can be had for around $400 or less if you get lucky on eBay / Craigslist.
If you aren't afraid to point objects yourself, a newtonian or dobsonian reflector works well. There is an 8" dobsonian on craigslist near me in Fairhope, Alabama right now for $125
As an imager, you can do something janky like putting web-cam guts into an old telescope eyepiece.
A Microsoft Web Cam was harmed in the making of this astro-imager.
Or, simply use your smart phone. Stick the camera phone up to the eyepiece and click-away until you get something usable!
They make cellphone holders that bolt onto an eyepiece and then hold your cameraphone up to the eyepiece for steadier shots. Use your time-delayed shutter if you have it and try to underexpose to keep your shutter speed fast, then boost in post.
The Nokia Lumia 1020 has a 36 megapixel sensor and shoots RAW. A great little tool for planetary and solar system imaging. Sure there is image noise but whatever, we have good software to work that out.
They even make filters you can put over a telescope to allow you to look at the sun!
(Do not try this without the filter!!)
Deep-sky stuff, that's a littler harder.
For deep sky, it becomes a photon-race. How much light can you collect in the sky before the stars start to stretch? Well that depends on your aperture!
The telescope you need for deep sky astrophotography is the highest aperture you can afford. Just like terrestrial photography :)
There are refractors, which are lens-based and reflectors, which are mirror-based and all sorts of opinions as to "which is best" vs "which is best - for the money".
I find an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain to be the best middle-of-the road for planetary and deep sky objects, for the money, so long as you can find a dark enough observing location and providing you have the right mount. An 8" SCT in the $500-$800-ish price range will boast an impressive 2000mm focal length with a somewhat disappointing f10 optics, which means you will need longer exposure or a focal reducer (probably both).
Our planet is spinning (and wobbling) and the solar system is spinning (and wobbling) so all of this spinning and wobbling will result in not-so-sharp stars in exposures over 20-30 seconds @ f10. A focal reducer can buy you an effective aperture of f6.3 @ 1260mm focal length. These cost less than $100.00, so umm.. worth it.
Okay, I said I wasn't going to get technical and that was a bit technical, so lets just say that the lower the f number, the better, even with a reduced magnification on the scope.
So, to get deep space objects in exposures over 30 seconds, you will need:
An Equatorial Mount w/ Automatic Tracking and Auto guider Support
A secondary, smaller 'guidescope' mounted atop your primary scope
An Auto-guider
A laptop (unless the autoguider is standalone)
A camera or CCD capable of 'bulb' mode or long exposures
Image-Processing Software
For my setup, this looks like this:
The big boy observatories use CCD imaging platforms that have an effective iSO Sensitivity of 20,000+ with very low noise but they are usually also low resolution. They are liquid cooled specialty astronomy monsters. These are usually monochrome cameras. Color is achieved through RGB Recombination of frames shot with color filters that ride on filter wheels.
K, so that bit was a bit technical too but the gist here is if you shoot a three shots through special filters, one w/ a green filter, one w/ a red filter and one with a blue filter, you can basically build a color image in photoshop or stacking software. For the image on this post, I went the easy route in photoshop by simply copy and pasting each frames into the respective RGB channels. No Stacking software was used.
Some folks have a DSLR body outfitted with specialty sensors that have been modified to make them more astro-photography friendly.
I haven't tried it (yet) but I'm betting the Sony A7s would be a great imaging platform for astrophotography. My A7R has been a trooper so far.
Once you have all of this stuff, the general operation looks something like this:
You align the telescope mount for 'polar alignment' to keep from star field rotation. On my scope this is as simple as picking your latitude from a dial.
You 'star-align' your mount to some guide stars used by the system to orient itself in space.
Then you pick on the hand controller, "go to -> M31" and the telescope slews to the right coordinates.
Your camera gets attached to the telescope viewport
You focus the telescope
You use the auto-guider scope and software to choose a guide star.
You enable auto-guiding on the scope. The auto guider then locks in the direction and uses the guide star motion to keep everything groovy.
You shoot long exposures, 5, 10, 20 minutes at deep sky objects. Shoot lots of them.
You combine those images in a photo stacker software. Some frames for luminance, some to rebuild the colors. (If shot in mono with a filter wheel)
Boom. You've made a picture of deep sky objects :)
At the end of the day, through persistence, with a setup like this and a good observation location you can use a DSLR or other non - astrophotography imager (probably still using filters though) to come up with some very high quality images, comparable - to those you get from a remote specialty observatory.
It is time consuming, expensive but a great hobby and a fantastic way to learn more about the Cosmos.
Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the observatory route, either. In the resulting images, the differences in your work will come through in your choice of time-of-day, observation location and post-processing characteristics. PS, Some of the best work I've ever seen, like the amazing work over at http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/ (my muse in this realm of photography) - most of which has come from observatory work!
In the October-December Winter Months, Andromeda is high and clear in our sky in reasonable parts of the evening. Orion starts to make an appearance as well. In the late winter and early spring, Saturn and Jupiter come back around in our sky, so that's always exciting. In the clearer months here on the Gulf Coast I plan on spending some time astro-imaging with my own gear and you are welcome to join me for in an outing. Just leave a comment or drop me an email at bill.dodd@graffitilogic.com and lets do some star photography!