DIY astrophotography camera

Cold Sensor, Hot Results: Upgrading A DSLR For Astrophotography

October 3, 2025 by 15 Comments

When taking pictures of the night sky, any noise picked up by the sensor can obscure the desired result. One major cause of noise in CMOS sensors is heat—even small amounts can degrade the final image. To combat this, [Francisco C] of Deep SkyLab retrofitted an old Canon T1i DSLR with an external cooler to reduce thermal noise, which introduces random pixel variations that can hide faint stars.

While dedicated astrophotography cameras exist—and [Francisco C] even owns one—he wanted to see if he could improve an old DSLR by actively cooling its image sensor. He began with minor surgery, removing the rear panel and screen to expose the back of the sensor. Using a sub-$20 Peltier cooler (also called a TEC, or Thermoelectric Cooler), he placed its cold side against the sensor, creating a path to draw heat away.

Reassembling the camera required some compromises, such as leaving off the LCD screen due to space constraints. To prevent light leaks, [Francisco C] covered the exposed PCBs and viewfinder with tape. He then tested the setup, taking photos with the TEC disabled and enabled. Without cooling, the sensor started at 67°F but quickly rose to 88°F in sequential shots. With the TEC enabled, the sensor remained steady at 67°F across all shots, yielding a 2.8x improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio. Thanks to [Francisco C] for sharing this project! Check out his project page for more details, and explore our other astrophotography hacks for inspiration.

 

 

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Learning The Basics Of Astrophotography Editing

June 12, 2025 by 13 Comments

Astrophotography isn’t easy. Even with good equipment, simply snapping a picture of the night sky won’t produce anything particularly impressive. You’ll likely just get a black void with a few pinpricks of light for your troubles. It takes some editing magic to create stunning images of the cosmos, and luckily [Karl Perera] has a guide to help get you started.

The guide demonstrates a number of editing techniques specifically geared to bring the extremely dim lights of the stars into view, using Photoshop and additionally a free software tool called Siril specifically designed for astrophotograpy needs. The first step on an image is to “stretch” it, essentially expanding the histogram by increasing the image’s contrast. A second technique called curve adjustment performs a similar procedure for smaller parts of the image. A number of other processes are performed as well, which reduce noise, sharpen details, and make sure the image is polished.

While the guide does show some features of non-free software like Photoshop, it’s not too hard to extrapolate these tasks into free software like Gimp. It’s an excellent primer for bringing out the best of your astrophotography skills once the pictures have been captured, though. And although astrophotography itself might have a reputation as being incredibly expensive just to capture those pictures in the first place, it can be much more accessible by using this Pi-based setup as a starting point.

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Astrophotography On The Game Boy Camera

April 8, 2022 by 4 Comments

The Game Boy Camera was the first digital camera that many of us ever interacted with. At the time it was fairly groundbreaking to take pictures without film, even though the resolution was extremely low by modern standards, and it could only shoot two-bit color. It’s been long enough since its release that it’s starting to become a popular classic with all kinds of hacks and modifications, like this one which adds modern SLR camera lenses which lets it take pictures of the Moon.

The limitations of the camera make for a fairly challenging build. Settings like exposure are automatic on the Game Boy Camera and can’t be changed, and the system only allows the user to change contrast and brightness. But the small sensor size means that astrophotography can be done with a lens that is also much smaller than a photographer would need with a modern DSLR. Once a mount was 3D printed to allow the lenses to be changed and a tripod mount was built, it was time to take some pictures of the moon.

Thanks to the interchangeability of the lenses with this build, the camera can also capture macro images as well. The build went into great detail on how to set all of this up, even going as far as giving tips for how to better 3D print interlocking threads, so it’s well worth a view. And, for other Game Boy Camera builds, take a look at this one which allows the platform to send its pictures over WiFi.

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Two-Bit Astrophotography

July 6, 2017 by 12 Comments

The Game Boy Camera is a 128×112 pixel sensor from 1998 that was probably the first digital camera in many, many homes. There’s not much you can do with it now, besides replicate old Neil Young album covers and attempting and failing to impress anyone born after the year 1995. Nevertheless, screwing around with old digital cameras is cool, so [Alex] strapped one fo these Game Boy Cameras to an old telescope.

For any astrophotography endeavor, the choice of telescope is important. For this little experiment, [Alex] used a 6” Fraunhofer telescope built in 1838 at the Old Observatory of Leiden. The Game Boy with Camera was attached to the scope using a universal cell phone adapter. Apparently the ‘universal’ in this universal cell phone adapter is accurate – the setup was easy and [Alex] quickly got an image of a clocktower on his Game Boy.

Turning to the heavens, [Alex] took a look at the most interesting objects you can see with a 6-inch telescope. Images of the moon turned out rather well, with beautiful 2-bit dithering along the terminator. Jupiter was a bright white spot in a sea of noise, but [Alex] could see four slightly brighter pixels orbiting where Stellarium predicted the Galilean moons would be.

Was this experiment a success? Between cloudy nights and a relatively small telescope, we’re saying yes. These are pretty impressive results for such a terrible digital camera.

Budget Astrophotography With A Raspberry Pi

April 20, 2017 by 38 Comments

New to astrophotography, [Jason Bowling] had heard that the Raspberry Pi’s camera module could be used as a low-cost entry into the hobby. Having a Raspberry Pi B+ and camera module on hand from an old project, he dove right in, detailing the process for any other newcomers.

Gingerly removing the camera’s lens, the module fit snugly into a 3D printed case — courtesy of a friend — and connected it to a separate case for the Pi. [Bowling] then mounted he camera directly on the telescope — a technique known as prime-focus photography, which treats the telescope like an oversized camera lens. A USB battery pack is perfect for powering the Pi for several hours.

When away from home, [Bowling] has set up his Pi to act as a wireless access point; this allows the Pi to send a preview to his phone or tablet to make adjustments before taking a picture. [Bowling] admits that the camera is not ideal, so a little post-processing is necessary to flesh out a quality picture, but you work with what you have.
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CES2017: Astrophotography In The Eyepiece

January 9, 2017 by 27 Comments

If you’ve never set up a telescope in your back yard, you’ve never been truly disappointed. The Hubble can take some great shots of Saturn, nebulae, and other astronomical phenomena, but even an expensive backyard scope produces only smudges. To do astronomy properly, you’ll spend your time huddled over a camera and a computer, stacking images to produce something that almost lives up to your expectations.

At CES, Unistellar introduced a device designed to fit over the eyepiece of a telescope to do all of this for you.

According to the guys at Unistellar, this box contains a small Linux computer, camera, GPS, and an LCD. Once the telescope is set up, the module takes a few pictures of the telescope’s field of view, stacks the images, and overlays the result in the eyepiece. Think of this as ‘live’ astrophotography.

In addition to making Jupiter look less like a Great Red Smudge, the Unistellar module adds augmented reality; it knows where the telescope is pointing and will add a label if you’re looking at any astronomical objects of note.

While I wasn’t able to take a look inside this extremely cool device, the Unistellar guys said they’ll be launching a crowdfunding campaign in the near future.

Custom Zynq/CMOS Camera Unlocks Astrophotography

January 7, 2017 by 22 Comments

Around here we love technology for its own sake. But we have to admit, most people are interested in applications–what can the technology do? Those people often have the best projects. After all, there’s only so many blinking LED projects you can look at before you want something more.

[Landingfield] is interested in astrophotography. He was dismayed at the cost of commercial camera sensors suitable for work like this, so he decided he would create his own. Although he started thinking about it a few years ago, he started earnestly in early 2016.

The project uses a Nikon sensor and a Xilinx Zynq CPU/FPGA. The idea is the set up and control the CMOS sensor with the CPU side of the Zynq chip, then receive and process the data from the sensor using the FPGA side before dumping it into memory and letting the CPU take over again. The project stalled for a bit due to a bug in the vendor’s tools. The posts describe the problem which might be handy if you are doing something similar. There’s still work to go, but the device has taken images that should appear on the same blog soon.

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