Cameras

[Preposterouz]

Hey all. I am looking for a solid cam for my celestron 1000mm 114LCM. I have my eye on ZWO ASI178MC but I don't know if that's the right choice since someone told me it won't work well with my focal length. I mainly want to target galaxies and planets with good quality. I am open to suggestions. Any help would be great! 

 

Budget 3-400. 

[PeterCPC]

If you look in the "Resources" tab above you will find calculators and CCD suitability. You can see which combinations are best.

Peter

[wimvb]

... Especially the fov calculator. You will find that the 178 has a small chip and tiny pixels. The light, even from stars, that hit the sensor, will be smeared out over many pixels. Less light per pixel means more noise (lower signal to noise ratio actually). You will almost certainly need to bin those pixels or resample the image. Unless you can image from a high mountain top or a desert, it's better to go for a camera with larger pixels, so you get in the range 0.8 ... 1.2 arcsecs/pixel for galaxies, and maybe even higher for nebulae. For nebulae, you also need a shorter focal length, to get a larger field of view.

The alternative is to pair the 178 with a shorter focal length, even for galaxies. But that will make a big dent in your bank account. 

Edited May 29, 2020 by wimvb

[Cornelius Varley]

3 hours ago, Preposterouz said:

Hey all. I am looking for a solid cam for my celestron 1000mm 114LCM. I have my eye on ZWO ASI178MC but I don't know if that's the right choice since someone told me it won't work well with my focal length. I mainly want to target galaxies and planets with good quality. I am open to suggestions. Any help would be great! 

 

Budget 3-400. 

Hello and welcome to SGL. Before spending money on a camera you will have to consider if the telescope and mount are suitable for DSO imaging. The FOV calculator will help you determine if the telescope/camera combination will have a large enough field of view for dso objects, but the main problem is the suitability of the mount. The LCM is an alt-azimuth mount, so long exposures required for dso imaging will be limited by field rotation. For lunar and planetary imaging this problem is not so great.