Thanks evryone. Long time waiting on a awol builder and I had to finish building house myself.
Thanks evryone. Long time waiting on a awol builder and I had to finish building house myself.
I'm just starting to consider dedicated astro cameras and need to take a deep dive into their pros and cons as I know absolutely nothing about them. OSC is more budget friendly but I am more interested in creating B&W images which I can print with the enlarger so I am thinking of a cooled mono camera ≤ the ASI2600. But I guess that I could shoot OSC, desaturate in PS, and print an enlarged negative.Originally Posted by Steven Ruttenberg
I have the asi6200mm. the 2600 would be a good camera. And filters can be a bit pricey. The filter wheel is not too bad. The filters will last a long time for sure. The narrow band can get pricey, but offer up a huge world for mono. Plus with mono camera and filters you can do color, but that is a definite skill set with gradients and such to deal with. The OSC camera is same price as mono, but no filter wheels. There is a better way to convert to b/w than desaturate which doesn't do a good job. Use channel mixer. There are ways to use channel mixer that are incredible.
Better still is get PixInisght. Not too expensive for life time license and upgrades, plus you will need that to read the fits files the camera generates. It will bring in the color images in red, green and blue channels. From there you can do all sorts of stuff in combining them and keeping as bw, noise reduction etc.
I can give you tutorials on both over webex, etc if you want.
Thanks for the reply Steve and the offer to provide instruction. I'll send you an email when I get the camera and need help. Besides the 2600, I'm also considering the 183, 533, and 294. The latter looks especially good but I currently lack the tech savy to determine which would be the better match for my gear. I pretty sure I will go with a mono camera as it seems that you only need one or possibly 2 filters (Ha and Oiii) for B&W but can add the color filters later for full color images. My scopes are an AT115edt refractor and a 10” Meade LX-50 which I just deforked. I am running them on a Sky-Watcher EQ6R-Pro mount.
I have an eq6r pro in pieces. LOL, rebuilding it. I also have a paramount MEII, CGX and a G11 Losmandy. Starfire 104, meade 10in deforked, 12 and 16 RCs. The other cameras you listed are not full frame and have different pixel dimensions, etc. Another nice thing about mono is you can run IR filters with them or UV as well. For the most detail, I might try running a blue filter around 400nm. If you work thru the equations, this will give you best resolution. Oiii is a rare chemical and typically greenish, like a teal. Ha should be good for the long wavelength of red.
I use SGPro to run my imaging sessions, it is rather easy to set up and works well with the eq6r pro.
For focusing do you have a motor driven one? I have several, I like them because you can auto focus with sgpro and it is infinitely better than manually focusing using a batinov mask, etc. Plus you can set up sgpro to auto focus if the temp changes up or down by a certain amount and auto focus at each filter change. I use PhD2 for guiding the whole mess using an OAG and asi174mm.
When you get a chance, send me exactly what/how you plan to set up, software will use, etc. If you have not really done this before, it can be a bit frustrating. Oh, and I would get the Polemaster camera for polar alignment and the adapter for your mount. I hate manually polar aligning using a polar scope, drift aligning, etc. I get close, but never great. Polemaster changed that.
I've been thinking about an electric focuser for the SCT. The OTA w/Losmandy DM-10 dovetail weighs in at 29.2 lbs which is .66 of the mounts payload. I'm trying to keep the total weight ≤ 33lbs. That leaves me with just 3.8 lbs to work with. The F6 without batteries takes up 2.15 lbs of that and I could replace the finder with the120mm Mini guide camera & scope; a lightweight focuser would put me right at the 33lb limit. Of course weight is a non-issue with the refractor since the OTA is ½ that of the SCT and the refractor, with its 2 ½ “ focuser, may be the best choice for most of the images I had in mind. Switching from a film camera to a mono camera would also save a little weight. I'm going to try using 35mm Acros first. If things go well with 35mm, I going to try MF and LF by mounting the camera directly to the mount an see how that works. Except for SPG Pro, I have downloaded all the software you mentioned including Stellarium but have not worked with them yet. Waiting for El Nino to leave.
Yeah, I was going to mount my 8x10 to one of my mounts and start with my Extar 14in. I have a dual schneider 300/500 as well for the 8x10. I did quite a bit of research into old school astrophotography using glass plates. Seems that all the telescopes were custom made to produce the image circle desired. Like 11x14, then that and any smaller glass plate could be used. I am a member at Lowell Observatory and talked with one of the staff about glass plate astrophotography and how they did it. Very interesting and fairly technical. Basically, the telescopes were just big large format lenses. I am gonna go about designing one and finding existing optics to put it together so I can do 8x10 glass plate photography. They even calculated the field curvature and made holders to counter the curvature. In essence the glass plate was precisely curved by the holder to negate the field curvature effects. They were way smart back then.
Feather touch makes an electric focuser that should work with your sct and keep your weight budget.
I've been looking at the Feather Touch but it doesn't appear to be electric. In fact, it appears exactly like the focuser on my AT115edt. Expensive sucker, even used. The weather forecast here is for clear skies starting Sunday through at least Thursday of next week so the refractor gets its "first light" photographing the partial eclipse with the F6. I have a full-aperture Thousand Oaks solar filter for the refractor which gives a yellow sun. I perfer the "white" sun that I get with the Baader filters but I only have the latter in 80mm diameter. Maybe I'll piggyback the Pentax 645NII with a telephoto lens and shoot both color with the refractor and B&W with the 645.
Cool. https://agenaastro.com/starlight-ins...a_s_model=6315 might work. I like viewing sun in Halpha and other narrowband filters, especially IR. Need a filter that is neutral (reduces the the energy uniformly across the spectrum) so that the filters are effective.
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