ABSTRACT
Douglas Adams', rationalized the essential requirements for astrophotography and then made more sense of the overwhelming equipment choice. These requirements broadly group into three areas: planning, equipment and imaging essentials. Planning includes location, safety, power, comfort, weather and planning, timing, equipment. Familiarity includes mechanical integrity and stability, tracking and alignment, autoguiding, dew control, focus and focusers, essential software, imaging essentials. Cleanliness includes sensor size, pixel size, sensitivity, image noise reduction, calibration, optical correction, setting up and note taking. Software is clearly a necessity for digital astrophotography and at the same time is the most difficult subject to give specific guidance on. The basic applications used in astrophotography are a planetarium, mount controller, image-capture and image-processing. Modern astrophotography CCDs use USB 2.0 interfaces and come with Microsoft Windows drivers. In addition, there may be an ASCOM driver for the camera and additionally, dedicated driver support within the imaging software.
