So 2 years ago I knew what I wanted, I just did not know how to get there. I did not even know how to start! All I learned from searching the interwebs is that I had an enormous learning curve to climb. Choosing and understanding equipment was a lot harder than I expected. Let me explain.

Setting expectations

Setting expectations is always a great start to a project. Especially if you have no idea what you are doing, right? So I set exactly the same goals as I heard many other beginners set since: I wanted a setup that allowed me to observe and photograph, both planets, galaxies, and nebulae. That is what we all want right?

Reality hits

It turns out that is not possible unless you are willing to settle for a setup that does a bit of everything but that is not great at anything. This is the problem:

• Planets are close by but tiny and terribly bright, so you want a telescope that relatively does not catch too much light, but can magnify a lot.
• Opposite to that, nebulae and galaxies, also referred to as DEEP SPACE objects (DSO), are huge compared to planets, but faint, so you want a telescope that does not magnify too much, but can capture buckets of light.
• The only exception to the above is our own moon. Bright, close-by but HUGE. Any telescope allows us to see or image the moon in some form or another.

Additionally, if you know you want to get into astrophotography, you want a setup that is ready for that, even if you want to start with observing, as not every observing setup can image, but every imaging setup most likely will allow you to observe.

One last big realization for me was that whatever I would choose, no matter how much money I would invest in equipment, I would never attain the quality in results that the Hubble telescope can produce. I realized I had to not only had to set expectations for the type of observations I wanted to do, the type of images I wanted to make but also set expectations related to the quality of the result.

Going all in or not

The first important decision I did not have to make, but you might, is how I would approach the hobby. You might want to decide that you take it easy, building up your equipment step by step as it might get expensive and you might not be sure how into it you would get.

I knew up front this was going to be something for the rest of my life. The harder it would be better. Most of the fun in this hobby is understanding what goes wrong all the time. It was clear from the beginning that I would jump into the deep end of the astrophotography pool right away. No need to be careful, or take shortcuts.

Goal Setting

Understanding better the consequences of the choices to make, I decided on the following. I was going to:

• Focus on deep space objects. Planets or some of the very small nebulae are amazing, but there are not that many of them. I did not want to start with a setup that would only allow me to focus on such a limited list of targets.
• Get a setup that would allow me to get into astrophotography
• When it came to quality, I found a great balance between cost and quality by trying out several setups on www.astrobin.com. Astrobin is an astrophotography image hosting website where you can query images by telescope and camera, and hence can get an idea of what results you can obtain with a given setup.

Choosing and understanding equipment

So I knew what I wanted and I understood what I should expect. It was time to dig into the details of how the equipment works and then choose a setup after I understood better all the characteristics.

There is one last piece of advice I would like to give before we dig in: Join a club! Google and Youtube can learn you only so much. Talking with people, joining them on a night out, seeing them operate their equipment, and asking them a few million questions is when it gets real. And do not be afraid to ask anything. People in this hobby love to talk about what they do, share their experiences with anyone that shows interest in their passion.

Then it was time to understand the equipment. But let me warn you, choosing a telescope mount is easy, choosing a telescope is hard, getting it all aligned and equipped with the needed add-ons just a never ending story

Taking pictures

When I had my equipment to start my observations, my mind shifted to how I could take pictures. And then I only realized how much complicated it could get for an amateur astronomer.