Telescopes |
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CCD Cameras |
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I got interested in using Webcams for astrophotography as a result of the work done by QCUIAG, but I don’t have the facilities to modify the cameras myself, so to do long exposure (LX) work I bought an Atik ATK-2C cooled camera (which is essentially a modified webcam in a neat enclosure with a fan for keeping the electronics cool). |
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DSLR Astrophotography |
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This will be used for wide field photography of large extended deep sky objects e.g. The Andromeda Galaxy using the ST80 refractor and also for imaging through the 14” Newtonian. |
Eyepieces |
Inevitably I have a (largish) collection of eyepieces. All amateur astronomers collect one of these over the years. |
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Filters |
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I also own a moon filter for decreasing the glare of lunar landscapes and a set of colour filters which are useful for planetary observing. |
Software |
There is a large range of software available for Astronomy and Astrophotography. A lot of it is written for specific purposes by amateurs and is usually very good. |
Planetarium Software |
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Imaging Software |
DSLR Imaging needs software to control the DSLR camera for ISO settings, exposure times etc. and for this I chose DSLRFocus. This allows all camera settings to be controlled from the computer including getting a good focus of the subject. |
Image Processing Software |
Once the image has been taken it needs to be processed to bring out all the detail. There are two aspects to this process. Firstly the frames of the movie file need to be processed to align them all and to ensure that only the best frames are chosen for use. This can be done by eye or the software can be used to choose the best frames, I usually use a combination of both. |
Once the best frames have been chosen they need to be aligned and stacked. For this process I usually use Registax. K3CCDTools can also be used for this. Both of these programs also have some image processing facilities which I sometimes use, especially the wavelet processing in Registax for solar system objects. After alignment and stacking the image can be further processed using dedicated image manipulation software and I usually use Paint Shop Pro 8 for this purpose. This enables me to change the size of the image and to manipulate the brightness and contrast, the colours and to blur and sharpen images or parts of images to bring out the best of the detail. It is usually a fairly difficult thing to do and it is very easy to over-process an image and spoil it. The final step in the image processing is to produce a picture good enough to publish and I usually run the image through a shareware program called NeatImage to remove noise. |
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