There are about 160 Perseids in the picture below, captured on the nights of August 11th and 12th, 2005. Over a total of ten hours, I took 3,555 JPEG exposures, each 10 seconds at F/1.8 ISO3200 on my Canon 1D Mark II and Sigma 20mm F/1.8 lens. This setup captures meteors fainter than what I can see with the naked eye in mag 4.5-5.0 skies, and bags enough satellites and aircraft to drive me nuts (I left those out of the composite).

There are many possible equipment configurations for astronomical imaging, and many ways to automate the process. This article describes the hardware I’ve assembled; in the next article I will go over the software I created to make all this work. My third article will cover the operational procedures and target scripts.

With my setup, I’m imaging practically every hour of every clear night at a focal length over 2000mm — and sleeping through it. I provide my system with a list of targets to image, and have the option to let it decide on its own how to go about doing this. In the morning, I have dozens of focused images taken from dusk to dawn, along with calibration frames that are ready for processing. While this entire process was relatively inexpensive, I did invest a fair amount of time writing the software.

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