Astrophotography - A Brief Introduction

Astrophotography is similar in many ways to traditional photography, but vastly different in others. The name of the game in photography is to capture electrons, commonly referred to as light. In normal photography you will find no shortage of light, which means that most photos have very short exposures (often well below one second), and you take one photo, one exposure. In astrophotography there is very little light, and that light is far as heck away! In order to capture enough light exposures are often minutes long and you must take multiple exposures (yes, multiple shots of the same thing, over and over). Astrophotography has an extremely high skill-ceiling, where you can choose how much you want to invest and get out of the hobby.

There are two kinds of astrophotography; deep space and nightscapes/starscapes. If you are considering getting into astrophotography I highly recommend starting with Nightscapes and building up to deep space. Astro is inherently very different than normal photography, and there is a learning curve that gets steeper the "deeper" you go. Straight away trying to image distant galaxies will overwhelm both you and your wallet...start shallow and gradually move to the depths.