astrophotography

[Cartron81]

I have had a orion xt8 for a while I just bought a celestron nexstar se8 to bring to hawaii to see the venus transit. I am looking to buy a meade DSI II to take pics of this event will this work with my celestron telescope? Thank you

[umadog]

Optically all you're doing is placing the CCD chip at the telescope's focal plane. This will always form an image. Some of these cameras screw into threads on the back of the scope (which may be scope specific, I'm sure an SCT person will chip in). Otherwise, you should always be able to couple it to a 1.25" barrel and lot in in place like an eyepiece.

The only thing you may want to ponder a little is whether or not you want colour. If you go for gray-scale you'll get higher resolution. Colour cameras work by placing coloured filters over the pixels and adjacent pixels have different filters. You end up with lower resolution for a given colour channel. Solar photography is usually done in gray-scale with colour added later for effect.