Can a ZWO ASI120MCS on a Celestron TravelScope 70 photograph the Milky Way?
Asked 11/22/2019
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I have a ZWO ASI120MCS planetary camera and a Celestron TravelScope 70. Can this setup capture the Milky Way, and if so, what settings should I use?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
6y ago
2 Answers
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It will be possible for you to capture small areas of the Milky Way with that setup, but the angle of view you can see with that telescope will be much too narrow to be able to see what one usually means when they say "The Milky Way", which can stretch overhead from one horizon to the other at certain times of the year. You need a lens with a much wider angle of view than that, and a camera that can capture a large portion of the image circle projected by such a wide angle lens.
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
6y ago
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Not in the usual wide-field sense. Your ASI120MCS has a very small 1/3-inch sensor, and the TravelScope 70 is about 400mm focal length, so the field of view is extremely narrow—under about 1 degree. That’s more like a tightly cropped telescopic view than a Milky Way landscape shot.
With this setup, you may be able to record only a small patch of the Milky Way, but not the broad band stretching across the sky that people normally mean by “Milky Way photos.” A good way to see the limitation is to point it at the full Moon: if the Moon already fills much of the frame, the Milky Way will be far too large to capture as a whole.
For classic Milky Way images, you generally need a much wider-angle lens and a camera with a larger sensor. This telescope-camera combination is better suited to narrow-field targets than wide sky scenes.
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