South Wales Astronomy: How I Started Astrophotography

How it all began.

I always loved space, I was constantly watching loads of documentaries about different aspects of space. I Watched a lot of YouTube videos on space as well as astrophotography too. The biggest inspirations I took from was a few YouTubers, AstroBackyard, Astro Biscuit, Delta Astrophotography and Nebula Photos.

It was around May 2024 when I had go up to my parents and started talking about how I really wanted to start doing astrophotography and started talking about cameras I was thinking about getting. My dad then told me about his old camera and that I could lend it as he doesn't use it anymore. This camera would be the one I'm still using today (as of 16/03/2025) which is the Canon EOS 400D.

Using this camera, an old tripod and a wireless remote; I sat outside in my garden and started taking my first long exposures of the sky. I sat there every night I could for about an hour or 2 straight just clicking the button on the remote every 13 seconds. From this point I had started following the tutorials from Delta Astrophotography on YouTube where I learned how to edit astro-specific photos in photoshop and how I would go about stacking my frames. This is where I found out about Sequator, an astrophotography image stacking software mostly for wide-field images (like milky way photos), and where I started stacking all my images all the way up until January 2025.

When winter came and new years had just passed, Orion's nebula was in the sky every night and is the easiest deep-sky object to image. I then used my camera and took long exposures of 3 seconds each to capture my first image of the nebula. This would also be where I switched to a better software for deep-sky stacking called Deep Sky Stacker.

While my astrophotography started to incline at the start this would very quickly get to a standstill in my progression as with only a stationary tripod my exposure times were incredibly low and limited to avoid star trails, I decided to finally try and get some money together to buy myself the Sky Watcher Star Adventurer GTi GOTO mount. This was a mount I had been wanting for a while but didn't feel as if I would have it for a long time, however since my progression got to a standstill and I was highly dedicated to getting this equipment to progress further I decided to setup a gofundme to help raise the money I needed to purchase this. I also did other jobs to help get money towards it. Coming towards the middle of February I had received over £150 in donations and with my saved money towards it I was halfway to getting it. I then worked a deal with my mum to which she lent me the rest of the money for the tracker. This was because of a competition I entered for my astrophotography but couldn't really get anywhere without it as my photos were no where near as good as they could be and I wanted my best chance at winning. I am paying all the money back over the weeks.

Upon using this tracker my astrophotography has improved a lot, along with more time spent in photoshop my skills have improved completely.

First Camera (Canon EOS 400D)