Some friends after seeing a strangely cut bit of cardboard in the observatory suggested I write a blog post about it. Those of you who do astrophotography won’t need an introduction to the Bahtinov Mask, but this post might be of interest to the rest.

Getting focus right in astrophotography isn’t easy. Autofocus doesn’t work like it does for normal lenses. And judging it manually is error pone, you can estimate when a star looks like a point, but there is a large margin of error in that estimate, a bright star may look like a sharp point but the fainter stars may still will be blurry. This is especially true in poor seeing where star image blobs can look the same over a large focus range. Continue reading Getting sharp focus with your telescope →