I have a Meade LPI that I have been using for imaging. I chose it because it was cheap and I had heard it would come to focus in the PST. The first thing I did, since I had dealt with dark noise in another job, was to cap the EP and see if it was dark. Much to my surprise I found that it was not only not dark but it was quite noisy. I started thinking to myself, wow software must be way better than 25 years ago when I understood image processing as we would have thrown this away.
I kept playing with it (indoors) and noticed that sometimes it was more noisy that others. I was thinking it was temperature related (as that's what I would expect) but it did not seem to be really effected by temperature. A cool morning was the same as a hot afternoon. Now when I say noise the pixels were running at about 30 of 255!
Now this camera was just laying on my desk and I passed my hand over the camera to reach for something and I realized that even with the lens cap on there was light getting in. So I did what always got me in trouble as a kid, I went for the toolbox and took the thing apart. Much to my surprise the casing that looked like black plastic was really a very dark translucent red to show the LED. I quickly got out the Krylon Ultra Flat Black and painted it. Then I decided that having a black thing in the sun was not good so I painted it the lightest color I had which was silver.
Well, anywho, it comes to focus and it was cheap. I have discovered I do like taking photos and would like to do more of it and was really wondering what I should look for in a solar camera? I would like to do white light and h-alpha and maybe one day CaK. I bet I never take it out at night so that is not so important to me.
I can't buy one for a few months so I just wanted in know what cameras I should be thinking about? I might be able to squeeze together around $1000.
Are used cameras a good idea? I have a used ToUcam that I got just to tinker with. I am ordering a B/W chip. Thank you for making it to the end of this verbose post.
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