Help needed

[DaveRiley]

Hello Everyone, Dave Riley here. I´m looking for advice on which camera to use with my Redcat 51? there are so many choices out there. Having suffered a Stroke at the begginning of June, my movement is a little restrained at the present time. So, I am searching for ways to photograph nebulae, galaxies etc from the comfort of my laptop?? Is it possible to run cables over a distance of six meters?? If you all have camera recommendations I would also appreciate software recommendations too. I have always had an interest in astronomy, so I  have a little knowledge of the night sky constellations etc. Waiting for your advice.

Best regards, Dave

the photo below was taken many years ago as you all see improvements are needed

 

 

[vlaiv]

Hi Dave and welcome to SGL.

Probably best camera choice for that little scope would be dedicated cooled CMOS camera. These are relatively cheap these days. What would be your budget and expectations?

Remote telescope operation is possible and in fact, most of imaging session is spent in front of the laptop. There are a few things to be done first (setting up, aligning scope, focusing if you don't have electronic focuser and such things), but for the most part one is just sitting in front of their laptop.

6 meters is a bit long distance for cables, and although it can be done with powered USB hub, maybe better option would be to go truly remote. Have one computer to control the mount and camera that is placed next to the telescope and use another computer to connect to first one via either Remote desktop (windows) or sort of VNC protocol (linux).

Computer that controls telescope, mount and camera need not have all the accessories - it can be either laptop or some sort of "NUC" / small factor computer. Quite popular solution for the tech savvy is to use Raspberry PI at telescope and connect to it from linux based work station over network for example.

Out of the box light weight solution would be ZWO ASI-AIR - wireless small computer that you use by connecting to it via tablet or smart phone.

Software will depend on your choice of equipment for this. You can either go with Linux based systems (free / open source) - where you will have to use INDILIB and EKOS / KSTARS (people report that it is working very well if you are concerned about features and stability) or Windows based system where you'll have to use ASCOM platform. There you have variety of software for capturing images - APT is good for DSLR type cameras, NINA is open source, SGLite / SGPro is very good payed solution (they recently changed subscription model and there is some concerns in community if it's worth the money now) and many more.

I'm sure MacOS eco system is also available but I don't really know much about it.

In the end, there is no really simple and straight forward answer to such a broad question. What you could do is provide a bit more information on your setup (mount) and how you plan to use it, as well budget and expectations. That way we can narrow down possible choices.