The Deep-sky Imaging Primer, Second Edition by Charles Bracken
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an amazingly comprehensive introduction to using your telescope with either a DSLR camera or a specialist astronomy camera for taking pictures of the night sky – specifically stars, galaxies and nebulae, rather than planets. It gives a thorough grounding on the theory, and follows it up with very helpful walkthroughs of processing the images you have taken with either Photoshop or PixInsight (with much of the advice probably working for other photography packages out there). Although the theory can get quite deep, even with my limited understanding it works pretty well, with each chapter starting with the straightforward stuff, and then diving pretty deep. I found myself skipping a few sections the first time through, and returning to them later when I needed their advice, and when I knew a little more to make them understandable!
I’ve been working my way through it for a few weeks now, and have succeeded in using its advice to produce some quite acceptable (for me!) photos of a few of the familiar objects out there. So I couldn’t be more pleased. Five (very beautifully imaged) stars.
Just to add to this, a couple of years later – I still refer to this book pretty much every time I am processing astrophotography. As PixInsight continues to evolve, I’m sure it will fall a little behind, but it’s holding up very well in 2020, at least.