Imaging - what am I getting myself into? Couple Q's

[KennySharp]

Try this link to my Flickr account, organised by album. Note: The close up solar, lunar and planet images are taken using a cheap Celestron NextImage ccd camera on my telescope. The rest are my DSLR.

https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/kennysharp/sets/

[KennySharp]

Good info, I think my first 'goal' obviously is to start with what I got, $1200-2000 is probably my price range, I have no intent on taking $10,000 pictures, I just want to be able to see some galaxies in color.

With this budget I'd buy a good DSLR and a tracking mount like a Star Adventurer plus miscellaneous other accessories. The tracking mount will mean you can do minutes of long exposure rather than only 10-15 seconds.

[MattJenko]

Just to add to the information for Macs. I use all native Mac software, no Windows emulators:

- Canon EOS utility runs natively on a Mac. You can use this to schedule long exposure sequences.

- EQMac. You can use this to control your telescope mount. I use it to control my HEQ5

- PHD2. This is a guiding piece of software to track the mount using a guide scope and guide camera.

- Stellarium. This is a planetarium program you can use to find targets and also use to point the telescope at whatever takes your fancy. Cartes du Soleil also works the same way but is not as glossy looking.

All free, all Mac native.

Cheers

Matt

[ollypenrice]

Skimming through the thread I don't see an accurate explanation of the multiple sub approach. Maybe I missed it but here's the point; even after dark subtraction you will have random residual noise in a picture and quite a lot of it. Because it's random a pixel which is too bright in one sub will be too dark in another, etc etc. When you average out the full set this random variation cancels itself out. It is not until you are in the thirties of sub exposures that this benefit begins to slow down.

If ever you want to measure something accurately you should measure it several times and take the average of the multiple measurements. Essentially this is what we are doing in AP with our multiple subs.

Olly

[wxsatuser]

Various stack sizes.

http://www.samirkharusi.net/sub-exposures.html

[ollypenrice]

Various stack sizes.

http://www.samirkharusi.net/sub-exposures.html

Interesting demo. What's more, the harder you stretch the more useful the deep stack proves to be.

Olly

[dph1nm]

If ever you want to measure something accurately you should measure it several times and take the average of the multiple measurements. Essentially this is what we are doing in AP with our multiple subs.

Hmm - I don't think this is quite the right analogy.  The improvement in AP (well most of it - I know you can clip non-random outliers etc) doesn't come from the averaging process but from having more photons in total. Subs are just a convenient way of collecting them - if you didn't have to worry about hot pixels, saturation, tracking, low flying planes etc then one long exposure would be just as good.

NigelM

[Thalestris24]

According to DSS:

http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/theory.htm