CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: A discussion on Astronomical CCD cameras

So, you have made up your mind that you are going to get into Astro-imaging and want to know what you need from the ground up and how much it will cost you. Everyone before me has made excellent points on this topic and if there is one point I would agree with first more than any other point it would have to be with Mike Sandy’s point on buying a copy of the New CCD Astronomy. Ron Wodaski’s book is a must and the first item you need to buy in my opinion. It will accomplish two very important aspects of this discussion.

First, it will show you just how much involvement is involved in CCD imaging; and two, it will give you a better understanding of your true desires you have as to whether you want to truly continue down this road. I think this is one of the key reasons you see so much imaging equipment for sale on AstroMart today. People jump into the hobby expecting to take Robert Gendler quality images within a few short weeks of there equipment arrival and a year later they still are at my level, which is okay, but light-years from greatness. So, they get frustrated and place their equipment up for sale.

Okay, you decided to continue so where do you start. I’m not really going to try to price this out for you, because that is up to the individual. What I will attempt to do is explain the process that went though this Cajun’s brain when all 8 out 8 plugs are burning.

As many of ya’ll already know, my first scope was Bertha, the Meade LX200GPS UHTC. I was interested in eventually purchasing imaging equipment after I bought Bertha but I figured I would buy her first and learn the scope. I was of the original thought that bigger is better and I was wrong in my opinion. While Bertha was a great scope I would never recommend a fork mounted system unless I had a permanent Observatory located in a dark place. Why, because the fork mounted systems are just a pain in the you know where, setting up and tweaking. The wedge systems are great, but they were not designed for mobility and if you want to do great images and don’t have the perfect dark backyard you are going to need mobility, no ifs-buts about it. Florent, our resident imager with the big Bertha has to be mobile and as you all know, he uses an EQ Titan mount with his system. So stay away from forks, you’ll be happier if imaging is definitely in your future. I totally agree with Suk on this subject.

When I finally realized I wanted to get into imaging I told myself I would not make the same mistake twice on buying equipment that did not meet my long term goals. I also decided that I was not going to piece-meal a system and get where I wanted over time because again, I see too many people start that way and before they have what they really need they one day start looking at what they have spent and what they still need to spend and decided they just do not want to get the final pieces need to complete their system and again, you start seeing them place their equipment on AstroMart. I decided I would determine what I needed for a complete system and I bought it all at once.

Granted many of ya’ll are going to say well that is great if you can afford to do it, but I can not afford it. You need to look at this like any other hobby, just a more expensive one. Some hobbies I agree you can work up to the final equipment, but in my opinion if you have decided to get into imaging seriously, you need to buy a complete system from the beginning. Think of the system like buying a Bass boat, it is a huge investment, but most people will pretty much keep their bass boat for life-time or a good part of it anyway. Talk to your bank or Credit Card companies. I got an excellent deal 4.25% interest on a twenty thousand dollar system from American Express. My minimum payment is only a little over three hundred a month but I pay more than twice that much and plan on having everything paid off in less than three years. I just believe many of ya’ll will never be happy trying to buy a little here and a little there. It takes to long and leads to frustration.

If you’re a person who will never be able to afford this kind of hobby, maybe you ought to be finding someone who already has the equipment in your area and just go along with that person and both of you enjoy each others company and equipment. I would never say no to someone that wanted to come over when I’m imaging. Maybe he or she will give you the raw images and let you have fun processing them on your own.

I decided that I would spend $20,000, give or take a few on my system. What would be the minimum you ask? I think you could half that price and still have a great imaging system, less than 10,000 you are going to be cutting corners, in my opinion, and will probably not be happy with the results.

Suk made the same excellent point that I believe to be very true, the Mount, MOUNT, MOUNT is the most important part of your imaging system. You go cheap here you’re wasting money on the rest of the equipment. I spent probably two months researching mounts before I decided which one to go with for my system. Again, many of us are of the opinion; get the mount that can carry a ton of weight. If you are Florent you need this, but if you’re going to stay in refractors and smaller SCTs the heavy load carrying mounts aren’t as necessary as one thinks. I was really leaning towards making the jump to Losmandy G-11 until I started really digging up reviews of the mount. It is a great mount for the price and I’m not here to argue anything different. What I did not like about the Losmandy G-11 is the PE is three times that of the Takahashi EM-200 Temma II mount and with the G-11 everything and I mean everything is optional, i.e., the polar-alignment scope, the covers for the drive motors, and if I remember correctly there was a few more items you really had to have. Anyway, when you take the basic price and add all the extras to the G-11 you are not much less than the EM-200 mount and the EM-200 comes out of the box with all of these things and has a PE of 5 arc seconds. Granted the EM-200 can not handle the weight of the G-11, but unless you were planning on putting a Meade or Celestron 11 or 12 inch SCT on it you do not need that capacity. The EM-200 has a load capacity of 35 pounds and even TAK will tell you that is a conservative number. With my mount I can handle my TOA-130 with a FS-60C on top of it easily. That setup alone gives me the ability to do wide-field and medium field imaging. I plan to eventually get a Mewlon 250 like Suk so I can do some close-up and personal images later. The Mewlon is a 10 inch aperture and has a focal length of 3000mm. My Meade 12’ only had a focal length of 3048mm. So when I have all three of these scopes anything else will be just a preference or specialty item. What we did learn in this paragraph hopefully is one excellent mount can handle just about all your future needs.

I have already shown my hands on what scopes I would recommend so there is not much more for me to discuss on the optical tubes. Your budget will determine which scope you actually start with, be it a 60mm APO or the large Aperture variety. I will recommend though that you start with an APO refractor because it will be the easiest to start out with. There are many great APOs out there and again research is a must, and I’m not talking about advertisement research, but honest evaluation reviews by owners of the scopes. Stay away from listening to people who tell you only great things about there scope and find the reviews that will discuss the focusers, and other little things that may not have been important to them, but are important to what you want. If some writes a review email them and ask very specific questions about the scope.

My decision for my purchase of the TOA-130, was primarily, I did not want to buy a used scope, not that there is anything wrong with purchasing used equipment, but I’m just not willing to pay someone four to five thousand dollars on optical equipment that I can not see first hand. To get back on point, I decided that I would buy a 5” APO because one, most people state there is little gain between a four to five inch and little gain from a five to six inch. I chose because of this issue to buy a five inch APO, the middle.

I would loved to have been able to buy a new AP, but we all know you grow old waiting on the list so I said no to the AP. Well you have some in the crowd that state; “Buy something else and put your name on the list for the AP, and when you finally come up on the list sell your scope”. I guess most do not realize how stupid that really is. If you’re going to spend what an AP cost in the first place why would you want to sell that scope at 75% of what you paid for it just to buy an AP that is no better than what you probably had already? Don’t get me wrong APs are great scopes, but in my opinion, no better than many others in the same class. Enough about that, because I’m not writing this to start the argument about who has a better scope, I’m just trying to drive home the logic it is dumb to double pay for the same equipment by only changing the name of the equipment. If you want a AP but want to start with a FC-60C as an example and just do wide-field imaging for four or five years by all means, put your name on the AP list for a 5 or 6 inch refractor, just don’t wait to get into imaging until your name finally comes up on the list and if you decide to go larger sooner don’t feel obligated to waiting. There are other alternatives out there.

Okay, you made your decision on the mount and scope and it time to think about the accessories, EPs, power, computers, software, camera(s), and other miscellaneous stuff! Let’s start where I made a mistake, EPs. Dumb me spent well over a thousand dollars on EPs. Think about, EPs and imaging, what do you need EPs for? If your interest is truly imaging your EPs are going to do one thing, collect dust. When I set up my system I do not even take the EPs outside because they never are needed. What EP is needed though, is a 12 or 9mm illuminated reticle EP so you can do drift correction with in the event your polar alignment is off. This is a must have in my opinion. The rest of the EP selection is your choice.

Camera(s): Digital camera, I’m not going to get into the debate because though they are an alternative to CCD imaging they can still never match the CCD quality of imaging. Yes, they can approach CCD quality on some of the brighter objects but they are a long ways off from meeting or exceeding CCD camera. Are they an alternative, I would say yes, and if your imaging desires are evenly split between viewing and imaging a much less expensive alternative.

Suk and others have already stated good views on the camera or CCD and you can decide on yourselt. Personally, when I was deciding on my choice I knew I was going to never be satisfied until I had the best one out there so I just skipped the Sbig 2000 and went straight for the 10XME. Was that a waste of technology on me, probably so, but I figured when I finally reached a level of competence I would already have the equipment to exceed. Do I think I made a mistake buying the 10XME, no. It is a great camera and will give me many more years of enjoyment and challenge than if I had purchased the Sbig 2000. When I finally do get better at imaging I will be trading my 10XME on one of the newer 1100 series that have the 35mm size chips, but that is years not months down the road, unless I win a lotto.

I also agree with many that stated the Sbig family is a good standard and a great choice of cameras. Long-term planning I would recommend that you think of the auto-guiding as being performed by a dedicated auto-guiding scope. That is why I plan on purchasing the FS-60c and mounting it on top of my TOA-130. It will act as an auto guider scope for a Sbig, STV or ST-4 I will buy, probably used, for the sole purpose of auto-guiding. Too many times, I have tried high power imaging and not been able to find or lock on a guide star due to either no stars available or the filter I was using cuts out to much light and does not allow the auto-guider chip to see it properly. A dedicated scope just for auto-guiding eliminates these problems.

Auto Focuser: A must, you can’t leave home with out one. I thought I could, but found it all but impossible to get a true focus, especially when you are using a reducer. The scope at less than f6 has such a critically small sweet spot you will never find it by hand jamming. I don’t care how good your mechanical focuser is. Save your self a ton of trouble and plan on the price of an auto-focuser. Personally I do not know why the big APO manufactures do not build these into their refractors already. It is a critical item for imaging. I use and love the Robo-Focuser. Robo-Focus like many of the others has automatic temperature compensation and can easily be controlled from the computer. They look ugly mounted but like the Apache helicopters I use to fly, sometimes ugly is beautiful. Cost, I believe was a little less than 400.00.

Computer: For imaging and controlling you do not need the fastest hottest computer on the street. You do need a fairly good one though. I bought a HP laptop from the refurbish HP section at HP. They have many discontinued models and refurbished models they sell 400 to 500 dollars less than brand new. I bought a AMD model through them with 512megs of memory, a ATI graphics card and 30meg hard drive. On any given night when I’m shooting in 1x1 bin each file is 6.5 megs. If I shoot ten luminance images that is 65 megs on the hard drive. It does not take long to fill up a hard drive. Look at some of the Web Cam imagers taking video. It is easy to get a 250meg video image and if your computer is not fairly updated you like many will experience many frames dropped when collecting images for stacking. So to that point you do not need the best but you do not want some old piece of junk either. I would plan on a price range in and around eight to nine hundred dollars for a laptop.

Software: CCDSoft comes with the Sbig cameras and many people use and love it. I purchased MaxIm DLL/CCD with my system. I like it better not because it is better but because I learned on it and have come to like it. I think one might be slightly better than the other, but it is a personal choice. These two programs are what you will use to guide, take and process your images with. I do not use either for final processing which brings me to the main focus of this section, Photoshop CS. This program in my opinion is a must, not PS 6.0 or 7.0 but a must for 8.0 or as PS calls it CS. Suk already alluded to the cost, but you never get Gendler type results if you do not own this software. It has a huge learning curve, but once you have learned it, everything else is just software. Photoshop Cs is a definite to build into your price list.

Extras: In the extra category I would include the TV Powermate 2X and 4X. Both of these are the 2 inch versions and are really nice for imaging through. I have imaged with both and they give your system many more options when imaging.

Reducer and Field Flattners. In the APO line they are not absolutely necessary but really enhance your options when it comes to imaging. I choose my night a head of time and decide what it is going to be; i.e., a wide-field (reducer), medium field (no reducer) or a PowerMate night. I try not to change these configurations during the night because imaging takes a long time and I never complete what I had planned for the night anyway, and changing your configuration just takes up much more of that valuable time.

Other extras you definitely need are a dew remover if you live in a humid area like I do. Finally, power system, you have to have one, be it batteries or AC. I chose AC even if it means lugging a Generator, I hate batteries.

In summary, I’m sure many would have liked me to price out a system for you, but I did not want to do that. I only wanted you to understand all of the variables that go into imaging and what you decide you need to consider when building an imaging system. In that endeavor, I hope I enlighten your thoughts on the subject. Remember Research, Great Mount, Auto-Focuser, and the rest you can cut a few corners on.

I’m sure I have forgotten some points and as my old brain remembers them I’ll add to this thread. Now I must go setup for imaging tonight.

BTW, no one mention what imaging requires you to lug around with you. The image below is a complete imaging system consisting of the TOA-130, EM-200 Temma II, Sbig 10XME and all the accessories and support equipment. That’s why you need mobility.

My Quarter
Charles

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