lotus1
sage
Reged: 12/11/06
Posts: 246
Loc: PALM COAST FL USA
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I posted last night that I was looking into DSLR for astro photo. Got some good advice on what camera to start with. (Canon XTi) Good, but alot of $ for someone who knows nothing about DSLR imageing. Still I'm going to buy it b/c it came highly recommended, even by the camera store personel. A few other things I was wondering about: 1. Does DSLR imaging need a laptop and software or is it point, hold shutter open at differnt speeds, load memory chip into desktop & print. 2. Software to help w/ cropping, color balance, ect.. What is the best one that I can get to load on the desktop? Is there something made w/ astrophto only in mind, say, somthing besides Photoshop ect.. which is really for all kinds of pictures. Thanks for the info 
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Celestron SE 8 SCT
SWAN eyepieces 9 15 20 25 33 40mm
9mm LV
Celestron Omni 2x barlow
Celestron filters & LPR
Tele Vue bandmates (nep/oxy lll)
"I find your lack of faith, disturbing".
-Darth Vader-
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Raven911
Carpal Tunnel
Reged: 03/12/05
Posts: 1899
Loc: by Cloudcroft, NM
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You can use a DSLR to take pictures without a laptop, but you will need a computer of some kind and a cable (or card-reader) to connect the camera to it in order to download the images for processing. You will need some kind of image processing software to do Astrophotos, along with the camera drivers.
Some software that is out there free for personal use:
IRIS
DeepSky Stacker (made for DSLR's)
StellarMagic
PixInsight
Gimp
Photoshop is nice to have, but it is not free.
All of these programs work great. Download em' all. Some are time-unlimited trials, so buy the full version if you like them.
Here is what I do, step by step...
1. Take photos.
2. Download to PC.
3. Load images into DeepSky Stacker (All images - Lights, Darks, Flats, etc.) and register and stack them.
4. Take the resulting image and either load it into PixInsight for stretching/cropping, or Photoshop for final tweaking. Gimp is a good substitute for Photoshop.
5. You should have a decent image at this point after a little bit of playing around with it...
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D. Perry
super member
Reged: 09/28/07
Posts: 171
Loc: Southern California, USA
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Astrophotography has never been a point, shoot, and print endeavor. 
You will see very, very little in unprocessed images especially of deep sky objects. The sky's background color will be distracting (usually orange or green). Here's an example (I originally put this together to illustrate a banding problem I was having with my camera but it also shows the difference between an unprocessed image and a processed one):
http://www.californiastars.net/images/help/40d.banding.proc.1.jpg
http://www.californiastars.net/images/help/40d.banding.proc.5.jpg
You can do a fair amount of processing with Canon's included software (brightness, contrast, rotation, cropping, sizing, etc.) but you'll eventually want to look into something like ImagesPlus, which is actually meant for processing astro images. It will also do things like subtract dark frames, divide flat frames, align and combine multiple images... things that are difficult or impossible with generic image processing programs.
As far as getting the images off your camera, that's easily done with the included USB cable and software.
Best,
Danny
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Daniel Perry
CaliforniaStars Observatory
Landers, California [ 34N | 116W ]
• Astro-Physics 900 GTO & Mach1 GTO
• DSI 10" Corrected Ritchey-Chrétien
• Takahashi FSQ-106EDX-III f/5 Quadruplet Apo
• Takahashi FS-60C f/5.9 Fluorite Doublet Apo
• Stellarvue SV80S Triplet Super Apo
• FLI ML11002, Canon 5D MII, and Canon 60Da
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lotus1
sage
Reged: 12/11/06
Posts: 246
Loc: PALM COAST FL USA
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thanks gang!
--------------------
Celestron SE 8 SCT
SWAN eyepieces 9 15 20 25 33 40mm
9mm LV
Celestron Omni 2x barlow
Celestron filters & LPR
Tele Vue bandmates (nep/oxy lll)
"I find your lack of faith, disturbing".
-Darth Vader-
|
|
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