Gear & workflow · beginner-friendly
None of us started with expensive kit. Aino’s first aurora photo was taken on a borrowed compact camera balanced on a car roof. This page lists what we use now, roughly in the order we bought it, and the workflow that turns a night of frames into one picture.
If you are new to this, please do not buy anything yet. A recent phone in night mode, propped against something solid, will capture a decent aurora. An old DSLR with its kit lens at the widest setting and the aperture fully open will do even better. The single most useful purchase is a sturdy tripod, and the second is a pair of warm boots.
When you do upgrade, spend on the lens before the camera body. A fast, wide prime — 14 to 24 mm, f/1.4 to f/2.8 — lets in four to eight times more light than a kit zoom, which means shorter exposures and sharper aurora.
Deep-sky imaging is a different hobby that happens to share the same sky. It needs a tracking mount before anything else, and it rewards patience far more than money.
The €0 aurora kit
Shared between three homes and one shed. Years are when we bought each item, usually second-hand.
Aurora & landscape
Plus the everyday lenses that sneak into the archive: Nikkor Z 24–70mm f/4 S, Sony FE 35mm f/1.8 and Sony FE 70–200mm f/4 G.
Tracking & mounts
Polar alignment is easy here: Polaris is 67° up, almost overhead, and never hidden by trees.
Deep-sky
Planets & Moon
The ADC matters more here than anywhere: planets in the south rarely climb above 45°.
Every item on this list cost us something — a lens, a night, or a finger’s worth of feeling.
Lithium-ion cells lose most of their capacity below −20 °C. We run the shed rig from mains power and the travel kit from a USB-C power bank kept inside a jacket, with a dummy battery in the camera.
Dew heaters are really frost heaters here. A low setting all night beats a high setting once the lens has iced over. Never wipe frost off a front element; let it sublimate.
Bring cold gear indoors in a sealed bag with a sachet of silica gel and leave it closed for two hours. We learned this after a cracked filter and a camera that fogged inside for a week.
At −30 °C ordinary USB cables turn stiff and snap. Silicone-jacketed cables survive. So do metal tripod clamps; plastic quick-release levers do not.
Mount grease and helicoid lubricants thicken in deep cold, so motors stall and focus drifts as the tube shrinks. We refocus every hour, or whenever the temperature drops by three degrees.
Gear can be replaced. Use chemical warmers, eat something every two hours, stand on a foam mat instead of snow, and go inside the moment anyone in the group stops making sense.
Our deep-sky workflow. Aurora frames skip most of it: they are single exposures, developed like any landscape photo.
Lights are the actual exposures of the target. At the end of the night we also take flats (an evenly lit white screen, to map dust and vignetting), and keep a library of darks and bias frames at the camera’s set temperature. A cooled camera at −10 °C makes the darks reusable for a whole season.
Clouds, satellites, aircraft and wind gusts ruin individual frames. We grade them by star roundness and background brightness in Siril and throw out the worst ten to twenty per cent. Satellite trails that remain are removed later by sigma-clipping during stacking.
Siril subtracts the darks, divides by the flats, aligns every frame on the stars and averages them. Stacking is where the magic happens: noise falls with the square root of the number of frames, so 100 frames are ten times cleaner than one.
Town glow, moonlight and the aurora itself leave smooth gradients across the frame. We model and subtract them, then calibrate colour against star catalogues so that a G-type star comes out white.
The stacked image is mostly black, because the interesting signal sits in the darkest few per cent of the histogram. A careful non-linear stretch lifts the faint nebula without blowing out the stars. This step takes us longer than all the others together.
Noise reduction on the background, a little sharpening on the bright structure, star size reduction if the stars dominate. Then we leave it overnight and look again in the morning with fresh eyes — usually to turn the saturation down.
Mostly free. Planning, capture and processing.
| Tool | Used for | Cost | Who |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stellarium | Planning: framing, rise and set times, what is up tonight | Free | All |
| N.I.N.A. and ASIAIR | Capture automation, plate solving, focusing, guiding | Free / with device | Aino |
| PHD2 | Autoguiding on the EQ6-R | Free | Aino |
| Siril | Calibration, stacking, gradient removal, colour calibration | Free | Aino, Saara |
| SharpCap and FireCapture | High-speed planetary and lunar video | Free / Pro licence | Saara |
| AutoStakkert! | Stacking the sharpest planetary frames | Free | Saara |
| RegiStax and WinJUPOS | Wavelet sharpening; derotating Jupiter | Free | Saara |
| Sequator | Stacking Milky Way and star-trail frames | Free | Joonas |
| darktable and GIMP | Raw development, aurora frames, final touches | Free | All |
Our one rule for processing: nothing is added that was not in the data. We do not paste in skies, swap foregrounds between nights, or enhance aurora colours beyond what the sensor recorded. Composites, such as a tracked sky with a separate foreground frame, are always labelled in the exposure data.