Equipment Tips

Actual Step	General Equipment Requirement for Astrophotography	Updated: 2023-07-06
Purpose	Choosing the right equipment is a prerequisite for successful astrophotography. Here are some tips.
Next Step	Weather Planning

The equipment needed can vary greatly depending on what is being photographed. Please refer to the Target Planning topic for more information.

A good, sturdy equatorial mount that can support the weight of the scope, the guider scope, camera and additional equipment, e.g. on a tripod or a fixed column pier.
A telescope with an appropriate aperture and focal length depending on what you want to photograph,
A good camera, either an DSLR camera (unfortunately most guiding and capturing SW only support Canon and Nikon cameras!), or even better, a special camera for astrophotography.
For long time exposures (required for deep sky photography) you will also need auto-guidance support to improve the pointing and targeting accuracy of your equipment:

a guide scope or finder scope for manual or automatic guidance with a guide camera
a guide camera, such as the ASI120MM
a HW-guider, such as the ASI AIR + the supporting app on your smartphone or tablet
or a laptop + guiding SW like PHD2 ("Push Here Dummy") or similar tools

For picture capture, especially for astro cameras, you need SW and/or HW to capture the images: