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interested in taking pictures of planets and nebula. I have a Canon 550D and my wife has a 60D. I'd like to keep it simple. Should I get a refractor or reflector telescope. Or a Redcat . I read about modding my 550 but I really dont want to screw up a good camera. Maybe a Celestron Nexstar and what size will work. This is just for our personal use.

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Hi

The 550d has video crop mode capability which will be helpful on the Moon and planets when used with a long focal length.

What camera lenses do you already have?

Is this for using at home or needing to be portable as well?

I meant to add the Celstron Nextstar moves by tiny left right up down movements which is fine for the Moon and planets but limiting for DSO as it keeps the object in the field of view but does not follow the Earth's rotation.

Edited by happy-kat
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Planets and nebula require two quite different approaches.  Planets are very small but bright, so need a very long focal length to magnify them.  As they are affected by atmospheric distortions, the usual technique is to record a video stream of hundreds of frames and use software to automatically select and stack the sharpest frames.  Nebula are fairly large but dim, so require a short(ish) focal length and long exposures, which basically means a tracking mount.  If you already have lenses at about 300mm, you might not need a telescope at first, just a tracking mount.

 

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1 hour ago, allan schein said:

I have a Canon 550D and my wife has a 60D. I'd like to keep it simple.

Hi

As @happy-kat enquires, you probably already have what you need to begin. How about an equatorial mount to get started? Add a telescope at a later date if you get fed up of deep sky. That's perhaps as simple as may satisfy what you want to do ATM.

Cheers

 

 

Edited by alacant
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I bought a Celestron 6SE last January. I've used it mostly for Lunar detail and the planets this year with a Canon EOS 60D (video in crop mode, video images then stacked and processed). The OTA is a nice, convenient size which works well with its mount / tripod and the dslr attached. I will say that the 150mm left me wanting more aperture and I subsequently bought a used Meade 8 inch SCT (Only snag here was I could only use this OTA for visual as it was on an unpowered Vixen Eq mount. I only recently had the funds to buy motors for this mount.)

I plan on buying a planetary cam next year but using the Canon definitely allowed me to dip my toe into Lunar and planetary AP /processing straight away. Because of only having the SE Alt-Az mount for most of the year, I have not attempted Deep Sky photography - it's something I will try this Winter with a small 60mm F5 achro refractor I have on the Eq mount just to get some experience in the area.

The photos are all from the 6SE and the Canon.

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Edited by Peter_D
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1 hour ago, happy-kat said:

Hi

The 550d has video crop mode capability which will be helpful on the Moon and planets when used with a long focal length.

What camera lenses do you already have?

Is this for using at home or needing to be portable as well?

I meant to add the Celstron Nextstar moves by tiny left right up down movements which is fine for the Moon and planets but limiting for DSO as it keeps the object in the field of view but does not follow the Earth's rotation.

Hi and thanks. I have Canon ef 17-40 f4l and ef 75-300 f4-5.6 is usm

 

Edited by allan schein
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1 hour ago, happy-kat said:

Hi

The 550d has video crop mode capability which will be helpful on the Moon and planets when used with a long focal length.

What camera lenses do you already have?

Is this for using at home or needing to be portable as well?

I meant to add the Celstron Nextstar moves by tiny left right up down movements which is fine for the Moon and planets but limiting for DSO as it keeps the object in the field of view but does not follow the Earth's rotation.

This is basically for backyard shooting.

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I'll reiterate the classic beginner advice for deep sky, so long as you understand that plenty of people violate it and do well. As Somerled7 notes, planetary is an entirely different world, so much so that getting satisfactory pictures of both from the same equipment is a major challenge for a beginner. (And of which I am stunningly ignorant.)

Nebulae come in all sizes, but there are plenty of ones big enough that you don't need a lot of magnification. I use a 362mm scope and have yet to run out of targets. You can look at my image catalog and decide for yourself if I'm worth listening to.

Deep sky photography is counter-intuitive in many ways. Most folks think first about their optics, and that aperture and focal length are key. For deep sky, the mount is ever so much more important than the optical tube assembly (you'll see "OTA" a lot), simply because you have to do time exposures to get anything at all. 30 seconds is probably the practical minimum, and you have to have something that tracks to within a couple seconds of arc over that time or you'll see (at best) degraded detail and at worst big streaks instead of stars. A second of arc, as you probably know, is 1/3600 of a degree. If your mount ain't up to the task, ain't nothin' you can do to ease the frustration.

The quality of the optics does matter, but the size, oddly, much less so. Visual astronomers are all infected, to a greater or lesser degree, with "aperture fever", since a big objective gathers more light and can theoretically resolve more detail. For deep sky, the answer to "more light" is to merely increase the number of frames taken for stacking, and given the atmosphere's turbulence ("seeing" effects), we rarely get anywhere near to the theoretical limits of our optics. Again, my images are done with a 70mm scope. There are certainly dozens of great targets that my scope can magnify enough to get a good picture out of, and some huge ones (Andromeda, North America Nebula) wouldn't even fit in anything much longer!

Procedure and processing is an enormously important part of your game, independently of what you use to take pictures (or "acquire data", as astrophotographers frequently say). And the whole process, from equipment setup to processing, is a chain with lots of places to go wrong. Keeping it as simple as possible is a great strategy for ensuring that you actually enjoy this.

So, the advice is basically this: If you already have a decently capable camera and some telephoto lenses (especially primes, better suited to astro), use gear with which you're already familiar. Figure out how much you can stand to spend on a mount. It will be a precision piece of equipment built for a pretty small market (code for "oh my Bog, the PRICES!"), but you really do get what you pay for. A good mount with "goto" capability, enough capacity for starting out, and sufficient precision to do the job will probably cost upwards of US$800 and a thousand is a safer bet. You can put a camera on that and start learning the game immediately. (Note that older telephotos from the pre-auto-everything days can often be picked up quite cheaply, and some have terrific glass.) Alternatively, camera tracker platforms (e.g. iOptron SkyTracker or SkyGuider) are much less expensive. Less capable, but used within their limits they can do some wonderful deep-sky stuff.

If you really want a scope (perhaps you want to look through it too!) straight off, the "classic" advice is to go with a short, small-aperture refractor, preferably an apochromatic one. The shorter and lighter the scope, the cheaper the mount that can adequately run it; remember, you're all about not buying trouble for yourself at this stage! Refractors are pretty much maintenance-free, too. Most photographers use a field flattener so that the image is edge-to-edge in focus, but that's optional for starting out IMO.

Finally, if you ignore all the advice above -- feel free to! -- I strongly urge you to get one of the books on the subject and have a look. A grounding in the principles is priceless when you're making these decisions and when you're sitting there in the dark trying to troubleshoot something. I'm a big fan of Charles Bracken's The Deep-Sky Imaging Primer; you will often see Steve Richards's excellent Making Every Photon Count recommended here; and Jerry Lodriguss has several great books, and also hangs out at the Cloudy Nights online forum so you can pick his brain directly.

And welcome! Be warned that this stuff can be quite addictive. Space is pretty, even at a quick glance, but it's deeper than it looks. 🙂

Edited by rickwayne
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