Gear

I shoot from a fourth-floor balcony in Nicosia. Bortle 7 on a clear night, Bortle 8 when the football pitch lights are on. Every spring, someone in the astrophotography forums asks: “Which filter should I buy for light-polluted skies?” The answers range from “get an L-Pro” to “move to the countryside.” Neither is particularly useful if you’re standing on a balcony with a one-shot colour camera and two hours before the neighbour’s security light comes on. ...

The Milky Way core is above the horizon from the northern hemisphere between roughly May and September. From my latitude in Nicosia (35°N), the galactic center tops out at about 26° above the southern horizon. Low enough that Troodos at 1,700 m is worth the midnight drive, but high enough to image from anywhere with a clear southern view. If you own a camera and a lens wider than 50 mm, a star tracker is the cheapest single upgrade that turns a noisy 15-second snapshot into a clean, deep wide-field frame. I’ve spent the past few months researching them before committing to one. Here’s what the specs mean and which three models are worth comparing. ...

The ZWO Seestar S50 sat on my balcony railing in Nicosia for 47 sessions between November 2025 and April 2026. I pointed it at globulars, planetaries, galaxies, the Moon, and — twice — Jupiter. After six months I know exactly who should buy one and, more usefully, who should save the money for something else. The setup that kept me coming back The S50 weighs 1.5 kg. I carry it out with one hand, set it on the railing, open the app, and I’m imaging within three minutes. No polar alignment, no balance weights, no multi-star alignment routine. The internal plate solver — the same astrometry.net algorithm I wrote about last month — handles pointing. Tap an object, the telescope slews, stacking begins. ...

If you have €120–€180 and you’ve never owned an astronomy instrument, buy a pair of 10×50 binoculars. Don’t buy a telescope. I’ve watched too many friends spend €200 on a wobbly 70mm department-store refractor, see Saturn as a tiny pixel-blur once, and shelve the thing for good. There’s exactly one case where that advice flips, and I’ll get to it. But the default answer, for the person walking into this hobby with no gear and no specific target in mind, is binoculars. ...