Before you take ANY plunges into the deep end of astrophotography, join a local astro club!!! Don't embark on this alone (unless you prefer misery and expense)...

I'm an older "it ain't worth it unless you get it on a piece of film" kinda guy, but I met a JPL engineer (who is also a amateur astrophotographer) who ask me (an amateur stargazer) how I shoot the sky... I told him I'm a film guy, and he (almost insulted me) that film was dead in astrophotography... He then gave me a demo at the small observatory...

He set up a modest affordable amateur refractor and said about $200 dollars of stuff extra was all you need... A slightly modified webcam, some other odds and ends, FREE software, a laptop, etc... So I'm still feeling a little insulted as this guy is getting a little geeky with me, and I'm thinking "a webcam, oh please"... He's explaining general polar alignment was all that's needed and software does the rest (ugh)...

It was barely fully dark (and air not fully steady yet) and he focuses on Jupiter, a couple of clicks on the laptop, and it starts exposing over a thousand frames (my eyelids hurt from eye rolling)... Then after exposure(s), waiting about 20 min for software to edit frame by frame, getting rid of frames blurred by atmosphere distortion, correcting angular tilts, and stacking hundreds of frames on each other... Finally, image came up, amazing, like it was shot from a mountaintop observatory!!! I was speechless...

He showed me images on his fone of deep space before/after images of familiar constellations shot through a fairly heavy haze layer in the "before" images where the bright stars were BARELY visible over the bluish haze, but the "after" processed images showed MANY tiny pinpoint stars with multicolored nebula streams flowing through them, on a BLACK background... I didn't know what to say when he asked "what do you think"??? He had difficulty trying to explain what happened, but I jumped in thinking that the software had a microdensitometer feature that read minute changes in brightness in the haze layer and then scaled these differences visually... Holy crap!!!

So I departed a believer that film is dead if aiming an imaging optic upward (Dammit)...

You gotta see this in action before your next move...

Oh, and corran, strongly advise not to buy a powerful cat scope... Too much power, small FOV, and too slow to see much... Get a fast, short FL WF scope to see broad sweeps of stars, where the cat tends to overmagnify smaller points... And air is usually not steady enough to get a sharp image at the eyepiece...

Steve K