Settings for digital camera afocal-astrophotography

[lw24]

Hi all,

I'd like to try my hand at a bit of basic digital camera astrophotography.

I've got the digital camera: Fujifilm Finepix F10 (6.3 Megapixels, Super CCD).

I've got the adapter: Homemade camera-to-telescope adapter

So now what I need is some help.

My digital camera allows me to set exposure times from 3 seconds to 15 seconds, ISO from 80 to 1600 and Finepix colour to either f-standard, f-chrome and f-black and white.

Frankly, I have no idea what any of this means, so I need some help.

I would like to get some short exposure photo's of some DSO such as the Beehive Cluster, Double Cluster etc and also Saturn and the Moon.

I understand that I will have to change the settings depending on what I want to photograph, so can you tell me what settings I will need to use.

Hope you can help!

Cheers

[Cornelius Varley]

What telescope and mount do you have ?

Peter

[lw24]

Telescope: Skywatcher Startravel 120 (f/5)

Mount: Skywatcher AZ4 (Alt-Azimuth)

I know I can't track, so was wondering what length exposures I should do.

Cheers

[Cornelius Varley]

DSOs will be difficult / impossible without a tracking equatorial mount. You should be able to photograph the moon with a bit of practice and a suitable camera support.

Peter

[lw24]

Couldn't I just set short exposure times (e.g. 6 seconds), then combine a few pictures (6-10) on DeepSkyStacker.

Someone over on CloudyNights said this would work.

Cheers

[brantuk]

You have to remember that light from dso's is very faint and you can't collect much of it in 6 second exposures. Try by all means but I doubt you'll get anything meaningfull out of it. You'll definitely get star trails though.

[Viv]

I tried before adding motors - sorry, but it just doesn't work.

You get to see the colours, roughly what is there, but as Brankuk says - trails will be there.

[dph1nm]

You can do DSOs (i.e. most Messier objects) reasonably adequately by stacking 15secs exposures, provided your Fuji hasn't got too much thermal noise. But my worry is that you might not be able to manually set the aperture on this camera, so you would have to hope that it is automatically set wide open in long exposure mode.

NigelM

[astropete]

hi IW24, my kit is a 127mm skywatcher with a samsung 8mp camera, which is mounted to the e/p via a digimount. although my camera settings are pre set as per applicational use, i still get very good afocal results. this pic was taken using the cameras zoom function, with a bit editing.