From: Charles Lasnier (clasnie1_at_antispamdomain.not)
Date: Wed Nov 26 2003 - 02:17:30 EST
Hi Christopher, welcome to the list. Good questions! I'll give it a shot.
> Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 09:47:31 -0800 (PST)
> From: Christopher Hind <cixcell_.at._yahoo.com>
>Subject: Hi I'm new to the list
>
>Very interested in getting up and started taking
>pictures. I'm pretty new to this and have yet to get
>an adapter for my telescope but I was wondering.
>
>1. How useful is a Meade DS-114 for astrophotography?
Almost any scope can be used for photos of some sort. I'm not
familiar with this particular scope. A lot of less-expensive mounts
have problems tracking for long exposure, and the smaller setups can
be hard to balance with a camera attached. Since you already have it
give it a try and see. I am guessing your camera won't do long
exposures anyway, but you can do the Moon and bright planets like
Jupiter & Saturn.
>2. How useful is my Sony DSC-P50 2.1mp for
>astrophotography? What digital cameras do you
>recommend? I see alot of Cannon's.
If you're camera shopping you can read some reviews in the Files
section, and read previous posts where people have asked this
question. It depends on what you want to photograph. You can look at
the challenge photos at http://www.velatron.com/dca/challenge/ and
see which cameras were used to take photos you like.Try focusing your
telescope on the Moon and holding your Sony up the the eyepiece and
see what you get. Read the FAQ in the files section for hints to
improve your results.
>
>3. What kind of filters would I need to minimize light
>pollution and where would I get them? (I live in Los
>Angeles, yes i know that sucks)
Search the last few days of messages for "filter." Good filters are a
little expensive, not just colored glass. As in, a couple of filters
and you have equaled the price of your DS-114. The best filter is
many miles and mountains between you and the light pollution.
>I'm really interested in rich color shots of stars. I
>wonder why there are no pieces of software out there
>that accurately display the visual beauty of the night
>sky and instead replace them all with uniform colored
>dots.
Actually there is a planetarium program whose name I don't recall
which uses actual photos of the sky. I think it cost about $200.
>I also have a number of weird questions I asked on a
>astrophotography website that never got answered so
>I'll present them here:
>
>1. Two telescopes with cameras separated by 2000 miles
>with different atmospheric conditions. could you stack
>for a better picture?
People have done this. A separation of 2000 miles is not much
compared to the distance to a star. Atmospheric conditions change
every moment anyway, that's part of the challenge.
>
>2. Do you get better pictures using a grayscale camera
>and color filters or using a color camera? do CCD's
>pickup more shades of gray than colors?
This depends on whether you ask an astro CCD person, a film shooter,
or a digital_astro person. The cooled CCD cameras in many cases have
16-bit digitizers compared to 8, 10, or 12 bits usually in a consumer
digital camera. More bits can translate to more shades of gray.
However the eye can only distinguish about 256 shades of gray in a
single image. Most images on computer monitors will only display 256
shades of reds, 256 blues, 256 greens. All of these types of cameras
have produced great color images. The consumer digicams have the
simplifying fact that every image has all the color data.
>
>3. How many thousands of miles apart to get
>stereoscopic data? of planets? of constellations?
You can see the recent post here of the 3d Moon image by Sylvain
Weiller , Johannes Schedler, Paul Hyndman, and Pete Lawrence.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital_astro/message/36549
The Moon is the furthest object that will show noticeable parallax
from photos at different locations on Earth. Planets will show
parallax when viewed from different locations in the earth's orbit,
and some of the nearer stars as well. Its probably not enough shift
in the stars to give a 3D view for anything outside the solar system.
>
>Any advice, suggestions, etc would be greatly
>appreciated. I really value your input.
No shortage of advice from this crowd! :) For other opinions on most
of these issues, you just have to search through the megabytes of
previous messages on the web site.
-Charlie Lasnier
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