For the pros here, who have equipment worth tens of thousands of moneys, this may sound like a troll post, but trust me, it isn’t :D

As a beginner, I had a lot of fun photographing the night sky and learning all the post-processing the results of my work for the last months.

A lot of my work went straight to the trash, either because of a bad moon phase, light pollution, condensation, or super stupid mistakes, like forgetting to tick a checkmark in my time lapse mode and then coming home after 2 hours of freezing cold temperatures and seeing that your shutter speed has been 0.2 seconds all along… 😵‍💫 I still learnt a lot from my mistakes and improved rapidly. It was a lot of trial by error, but rewarding.

One thing I still fight with is said condensation.
I’m both broke ^(or, even if I had the money, I still wouldn’t buy a heating mantle for 250€ just for my amateur photos tbh)^ , and my camera is probably a joke compared to yours.

My workaround has been to use small hand warmers.

(If you don't know what I mean)

(the ones you have to boil first, then click the metal clip, and then they “freeze”, becoming warm for 30 minutes)

I activate and then press them against the front of the lens for one minute each 5 minutes or so, which of course sometimes results in

  • camera shake,
  • missing photos,
  • and in the worst case, smears on the photo, which won’t even be recoverable with my flats.

The reason for doing that is that I have a Sony RX100 III compact camera, which has a super small lens, so no heating mantle can fit on that.

A friend of mine is already more advanced than me and owns one, but his heating mantle is like 20 cm wide, while my lens is 5 cm max when fully drawn out :D

Do you have any cheap alternatives or DIY solutions for my problem?

Also, does anyone have an idea or suggestion on what I can use as star tracker

(?)

(the mount-thing that moves my camera with the rotation of the earth)

when I don’t want to spend $$$ on a professional one?

I don’t need a super expensive or accurate one, just one that allows me to increase the width of my photo, so I don’t have to crop >1/3 of it in the end.
I don’t need it to keep my shutter speed at 1 minute+, just to keep it below 15s, like I currently do.

Are there any workarounds, like using an Arduino or so?

Right now, I’m a bit restricted to about ~30 photos @ 10s, because elseway, the crop zone is too small or there are small trails forming.