The two easiest objects to image for a beginner are the moon & sun, as they don’t need accurate guiding or an expensive mount.
The only safe way to image the sun is through a specialised solar filter. Aiming an unfiltered camera at the Sun for any length of time will cause damage to any camera sensor, so it's essential to have a solar filter in front to completely cover the lens and keep the light to a safe level for the sensor and your eyes.
Also cover up, or better still, remove any attached telescope finder or star pointer.
It surprisingly difficult to find the sun in a telescope, and the best/safest gadget to use is a Solar Finder attachment.
The Moon is our only permanent natural satellite formed about 4.51 billion years ago, not long after Earth, from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia.
The moon has a diameter of about 2,159 miles (3,475 kilometres), so is bigger than Pluto. It’s moving approximately 3.8 cm away from Earth every year.
The sun & moon are excellent objects to image with a DSLR camera especially if one can manually focus with ‘live-view’. This would be very tedious to perform with motorised focusing and taking individual images such as with SGP software.
The Sun is the star at the centre of our Solar System and is middle-aged; it has not changed dramatically for more than four billion years, and will remain fairly stable for another five billion years.
The ancient Egyptians called the sun Ra (the sun god), Ra’s role was to sail across the heavens during the day in his boat.
At the end of the day, it was believed that Ra died and sailed on to the underworld, leaving the moon in his place to light up the world. Ra was reborn at dawn the very next day.
Sunspots are temporary phenomena on the Sun's surface that appear as spots darker than the surrounding areas. Their number varies according to the approximately 11-year solar cycle.
Although they look small from here, sunspots are many times the diameter of the Earth.
