Roughly Chronological Points to Work In
- Selected AS/GT mount with photography in mind
- “sturdy”;
- Boy, was I wrong about that
- “equatorial for astrophotography”.
- Understood field rotation of alt-az even then
- Didn’t know that most modern observatories are Alt-Az with de-rotators
- Saw some images “from Ottawa” (Albert’s) and assumed I could easily do that
- “sturdy”;
- Put Nikon D1 on C9.25 / AS-GT and imaged a few things
- M42: colours but very bad blur
- Some clusters (e.g. 862/884): bad star trails, little detail
- Saturn & Jupiter
- Bright blurs
- “Multiple” exposures (i.e. 4 or 5) stacked
- Initially used eyepiece projection adapter to get magnification needed
- Discovered advantages of prime focus + barlows, standardized on that
- Read & studied, realized I jumped too fast
- Mount overloaded
- Polar alignment critical
- RA drive stability critical
- PED and/or Guiding needed for long exposures
- Planetary stacking isn’t 3-4 images, it’s 1000
- Gradual upgrade of equipment & skills
- Mount to Losmandy G11
- Video imaging
- Capture
- Learn registax processing
- Master drift alignment
- Shorten focal length to a short refractor
- Learn PEC
- Discover “76 second error” and other issues
- Study PEC, upgrade worm, tune gearing
- DSO Imaging
- DSLR
- Focusing is hard!
- CCD
- DSI: oversold again. Hard. Poor quality.
- Focusing is hard!
- Hartmann mask
- Get autoguiding capability
- Try CCD again
- Monochrome imaging, focus on stability, round stars, understanding exposure
- Eventually add 3-colour imaging
- DSLR