I am just wondering if anyone here does any astrophotography? I have a Meade LXD75 SC8, and so far have only managed a few pictures by holding the camera up to the eyepiece.
I totally want to get into that! Saturn, I take it? I'm more in favor of the long exposures the Canon CMOS sensor can take to get galaxies, etc. But I'd rather have a motorized mount rather than a manual mount, so it's taking me a while to find a good system. But I've also read that most manufacturers will allow a t-mount so a camera can access the telescope itself by replacing the eyepiece. Not sure that you can use a P&S with that system.
Yeah one of the reasons I went with the scope I did is because of the mount. I also already own a t-adapter but not really sure how to use it or how to do long exposure photography. I figured if I do this with a webcam I can get instant results to see if something is too dark/fuzzy etc.
I KIND of do astro photography. My dad has a lower end telescope that I've used a bit. The problem is it has very poor tracking, so I can't use long exposures. I also found out I was using the wrong T-mount, Celestron makes two, one for telescopes with a built in barlow and one for those without. It turns out the scope has a built in barlow, but I didn't know the other mount existed and so I got the wrong one. I could never tell if I was getting the focusing right in any case. I'm on my laptop now, later I could dig out some of the shots I took through it. I got halfway decent moon shots, but nothing to rave about. However I've been experimenting to see what I can do with just my camera mounted on a fixed tripod, no equatorial mount. I did catch Holmes a few weeks back, and took a bunch of shots of it and stacked them using an auto stacking program. The results were not bad for a 200mm lens on a fixed mount in heavy light pollution. Don't discount the utility of web cams. The weirdest thing I've found in astrophotography is that webcams are among the more popular means of doing it. I mean astrophotography CCDs are still the high end way to go about the process, but I've seen sites run by astrophotography enthusiasts where their best images have been taken with webcams. More so for planetary imaging since they can't match the light gathering ability of a cooled CCD (although some have installed cooling modifications to commercial webcams), but I've seem some outrageously good pictures of Jupiter or Mars that were taken with a webcam. The process there is stacking, again, but using a great many individual images. I did my Holmes stacking with maybe 20 shots, they do it with hundreds or thousands. You can certainly use P&S cameras with telescopes. I think in that situation you need a more specialized mount though, because of the variation in size and shape among P&S units.
Yep I've been reading up and it seems like the webcam might be a better starting point for me. I picked up the Philips SPC900NC at Walmart. I also go the webcam to 1.25" adapter from ebay. What software do you use to take all the images and stack them? I've never done this before. One other question. The ISS is going to pass overhead again next week. I'm using the record feature on my Canon S3 IS but cannot get it dark enough to pick up stars. Does anyone know how I might be able to do that? Here's what I was able to capture on Thanksgiving, but since there's no reference you can't really tell how fast or how big it is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Dl2L8KZxE
The weather hasn't cooperated much where I can sit for a long length of time (or at all) but I did manage to grab some movies of Mars and the Moon. I used a program called registax and came up with these images. Mars: The Moon:
Believe me if you saw some of the other images people have taken, you wouldn't think mine are clear. Btw, Brick huh? I'm in Waretown.
BTW, Brick huh? I'm in Waretown. [/quote] Yup, and I work in Atlantic County. Drive through your area 3-4 nights a week.
If you're interested you should come out to Coyle Field in Manahawkin once with us. Lots of different scopes.
I plan on taking pictures of the eclipse tomorrow with just my Canon S3 IS (no scope). What are some suggestions (long exposure, multiple shots)?
