San Jose Astronomy Association usually holds astrophotography workshop at Morgan Hill, 10 miles south of San Jose.  It is a good dark place to hold this kind of activity and recently it was held last January 28, 2017 where a lot of people participated even those who doesn’t have any idea on astrophotography.

Here you’ll see the talk being conducted by one of the SJAA.  Topic includes Beginning Astrophotography up to the tools needed, then he gave a hands on walk thru in setting up the telescope, mount, camera and computers to do the astrophotography session.

You can see my rig here in the picture below. It’s an Explore Scientific 127mm ED with an ASI 1600MM-Cooled camera on an Orion Atlas EQ-G Mount.

I had some trouble in my setup specific to the camera software that I’m using. It was the Beta version of SharpCap 2.10 where it was not able to give me a very good result and at the same time drained by laptop battery, and on the field, battery is the life of astrophotography.