Astrophotography with the Raspberry Pi Camera
A while back I bought a Celestron 127SLT telescope with the goal of doing some solar system observation and photography. I had a Raspberry Pi camera and a B+ board kicking around from a previous robotics project, and decided to give it a try. It’s not an ideal camera for this sort of thing, not by a long shot — but I already had it. The v1 camera can now be had for $13. It was worth a try.
The results were better than I expected. Here’s some results. Details on how I did it are below.
How the Camera Is Mounted
A friend printed this mount for me. It was easy to assemble and everything fits well. This allows you to plug the camera in like an eyepiece. If you just replace the eyepiece with your camera, you are doing prime focus photography, which uses the telescope as a giant camera lens and focuses the image directly on your camera’s sensor. To do this, you remove the lense that came on the camera. The magnification you get depends on the sensor size and the telescope focal length…
