The right stuff for astrophotography?

ozzrya91

I have been in the hobby of night gazing for about a year now and im still trying to learn all that I can before I upgrade in telescopes. My current setup is a Zhumell dobsonian 10" telescope and a Meade ETX-80 telescope with autostar [although I havent used it much] I also have a hand held video camera that ive held up to my eye piece to record planets/the moon and ive inserted my Celestron Neximage solar system imager into my scope and recorded that way. I typically use a

5mm baader hyperion eyepiece

26mm Meade plossl

9mm Zhumell plossl

30mm [2in. format] Zhumell plossl

2x TeleVue barlow lens [1.25]

and I have 1 filter that I have used. I have a moon filter. I am a novice with registax and I have stellarium at my disposal, I have manually located a few galaxies/nebulas and sketched them as well as viewing and imaging all of the planets.

I still would like a few more years or so before I upgrade in scope/ imager.

I am planning on getting an 11-14in. GoTo schmidt cassegrain telescope once I do. I also would like to actually get into some DSO imaging done and ive heard that youll pretty much need GoTo/ tracking for that as well as a filter possibly. I have researched into some of these filters and they seeminteresting and the reviews seem to say most of them work great. I have also heard that as far as imagers go that the best 2/ most popular for astrophotography are the Philips toucam and Canon EOS. Is this accurate? I have seen some pretty impressive work done on youtube with ppl using these two imagers done through GoTo's like a Celestron 8in. Schmdt. [relatively similar to what im planning on getting in a few years or so when I upgrade]

I also found a Saturn video where the person was using a "Baader IrCut" with a Canon EOS camera through a Celestron 8" and the video of Saturn looked great seeing as it was all live footage, no stacking.

Would that be a good setup for when I upgrade?

Telescope- Some form of schmidt cassegrain or refractor GoTo [probably Celestron] 11-14in.

Imager- Phillips toucam or Canon EOS

Accessories- Some form of Nebula/ DSO filter


On a side note ive read that my Celestron Neximage solar system imager is supposed to be just like the phillips toucam and that would make sense seeing as how they generally dont work on laptops/computers with windows 7 unless you download the software for the phillips toucam [basically the toucam software is compatible with the Neximage] Yet when I see the Phillips toucam astrophotography and compare it to the Celestron neximage the phillips toucam blows it out of the water. Why is this?

All help and tips are appreciated.

Answer
To do decent astrophotography, you first need a telescope mount that counter acts to rotation of the earth and nulls out your latitude. This way, you can point to an object and have it track for long periods of time (several minutes) without having to move it by hand. So your dob, as configured will not work without help.

Something that you can do fairly easily is make a barn door tracker (also called a Scotch mount) that you mount your DSLR on for long term exposures -
http://www.jlc.net/~force5/Astro/ATM/Barndoor/barndoor.html

And get something called a interferometer -
http://www.amazon.com/Studiohut-Remote-Control-Digital-cameras/dp/B002IPQQPI

For higher end equipment, get something like this -
http://www.telescope.com/control/product/~category_id=goto_computerized/~pcategory=dobsonians/~product_id=09133

This has mass, which is something that you need for what your about to attempt. Mass, stability, tracking and aperture - and is moderately easy to transport. You'll still need to know how to polar align each time you set the thing up, unless you have a permanent observatory built (nice thing to have, if you have the room to do it).

The toucam is fine for planetary and lunar work, but for deep sky, you will need an imager. A Canon DSLR is a good way to go for starting out, but you do need software to run the camera, like this -
http://www.stark-labs.com/nebulosity.html

Which is a fairly easy to use camera control and simple image processing package at a good price.

For other software, get something like registax, for image stacking -
http://www.astronomie.be/registax/

And for image simple tweaking, you can try programs like Gimp, Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop (free, cheap, nosebleed).

For more information -
http://www.astro.shoregalaxy.com/dslr_astro.htm
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/NIK_CAN.HTM

Your about to embark on the hardest thing to do to right for amateur astronomy. Astrophotography has a very steep learning curve. But it is doable, if you take your time. Take baby steps at first and get used to how each piece of equipment is used and attached. It's going to take time

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Title Post: The right stuff for astrophotography?
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