Telescope Reviews: What are the advantages of film astrophotography?

Gee... I thought I was bad. TxStars, Let's not get too nasty here.. and hijack this post into a manual vs autoguiding war!

(Yawn...) I just woke up, after about... 5 hours sleep. Should be a good day!

First.. Autoguiding, once all set up and working does indeed make sure your scope is tracking well. But there is so much else involved in the photo that computers shouldn't get all the credit.

Autoguiding itself is NOT a no-brainer. It requires much more technical work than hand guiding, but much less physical effort. If you enjoy tweaking computers and hardware, then autoguiding is a fun addition to astrophotography. It also allows for photographs that would be almost impossible (or downright painful) to do by hand. Imagine taking 200 images, all in one night, all hand guided! OUCH!

Getting back to some of my other comments:

I tried to say, but did a poor job, that if you just starting out in astrophotography with FILM, you should go for wide field piggyback shots. It's a lot more tolerant of errors, while still requiring all the same skills as prime focus photography. When you do this, you will NOT (as Suk Lee pointed out) need to guide for lenses with a short focal length. As you increase the FL or as you increase the exposure duration, then guiding will need to be used. The FREQUENCY of guiding corrections is a direct correlation to the amount of tracking error being corrected, the focal length of he camera, the focal length of the guidescope, and the duration of the exposure. Everything is connected. Ok... I'm rambling again.

The bottom line is that in most wide field shots, with exposures lasting under 30 minutes, good polar alignment, and a good mount, you should not need to guide.

But I still feel that if you are just learning FILM PRIME FOCUS astrophotography, in which you will need to guide, the manual guiding is the way to go. Unless you already have a working knowledge of autoguiding! Autoguiding adds more technology, and in my experience, it can just add a lot more confusion to an already difficult skill to learn.

But some people LOVE gadgets, and for them they may do well by teaching autoguiding along with film astrophotography. But not me. I want to have my hands on the scope, and physically see any guiding errors.

All this is getting away from the original topic, which is the ADVANTAGES of FILM astrophotography.

The overwhelming advantage is the initial COST. It's FAR less expensive than digital imaging when you are comparing similar results. You just can not get close to what a $50 film camera can do compared to a CCD system for much less than $1500. If you can afford the higher end imaging, then this point is irrelevant.

Another advantage is simplicity. Many film shots are acceptable after a single exposure. No darks, or multiple stacked images are required. But it should be said that the better film images are indeed post processed, and some use multiple exposures, but when comparing a SINGLE, unmodified exposure, film is hard to beat.

OK.. I think I've babbled enough, so I'll let someone else offer more input!

CF

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