Originally posted by LePaul
One other question..what CCDs do you like? I've reading a lot about the Meade's on that site. Im noticing a lot of monochrome?
Well, that's another complicated question.
It again depends a lot on your intended purpose, as well as your level of seriousness.
Basically let's divide it into two camps. Cameras optimized for Solar, Lunar, and Planetary photography; and cameras optimized for dim dark fuzzies like Nebula, Galaxies, and star clusters, etc. For short let's call these genre Planetary and Deep Sky respectively.
For planetary cameras, you need something to help you beat the blurring effect of the undulation atmosphere. Imagine looking at a perfect photograph of a planet that is sitting on the bottom of a swimming pool with kids making waves at the other end. The waves will be constantly shifting, blurring, and distorting the picture your trying to look at. This is very like trying to look at a planet through our planets thick atmosphere. On a longer exposure, the undulations and distortions average together during the exposure and create a blurred result. What you want to be able to do is take an exposure of a fraction of a second to catch a moment in between the waves when the image is undistorted. The problem is this short exposure is going to cause the image to be very grainy and noisy. However, if you take hundreds or thousands of short exposures and use software (Registax) to sort thru them and find the sharpest ones and "stack" them. This stacking increases the signal to noise ratio enough hide the grainyness.
So you want an inherently low noise camera that can take 10-60 frames a second for possible several minutes. There are some high end cameras for this purpose like the Lumenera Skynyx models. Very nice. Very pricey. However amateurs have found they can get really excellent results with modified consumer webcams (a favorite is the Phillips Toucam). They have been modified by unscrewing the built in front lens and screwing in an adapter that lets you insert the camera like an eyepiece (See scopetronix.com is one source). You'll capture the 2-5 minute AVI's to a laptop or desktop and later use freeware like Registax to do the magic of sorting and stacking. There are also models like Meade's LPI and I think Celestron has one. I have an LPI. Its not bad. Has some really nice software. But It doesn't do as well as my old Toucam in my opinion.
I also have a monochrome Skynyx. Its VERY sweet. It dang well ought to be for the price!
There issue between monochrome and color is mainly due to two factors. 1. Monochrome ccd chips tend to be a bit more light sensitive. 2. because of the way a color chip must fit detectors for all 3 colors in the same realestate, the same size chip can have ~30% less pixels (resolution). To get optimal performance, some people choose to go with monochrome chip for the resolution and take three sets of images using different colored filters (RGB) and combine later with software. I wouldnˇ¦t go this route originally. It's a pain. For your fist camera, I would go with a color model.
Next, Deep Sky....
Wab
