Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
Basically .5 to 1 arc sec/pixel is good practice.
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I've been reading lately (Craig Stark's great articles on SNR) that you should target half your seeing, as you can't leverage greater resolution (you can't record what's not there) and so you lose out on SNR and make life more difficult for yourself and your equipment in terms of guiding, tolerance for error etc by going beyond that.
Apparently 3" is considered typical seeing, which suggests that an ideal target would be in the area of 1.5"/px in such circumstances. Of course, even if 3" is typical seeing, typical means nothing if your particular site is atypical, so you should definitely measure this yourself.
Here's a link to one of the articles I'm referring to; there's an example of resolution vs FWHM roughly halfway down the page that illustrates what I'm talking about
:
http://www.cloudynights.com/page/art...sampling-r1970
Definitely made me wonder whether I'm doing myself any favours with the 1.8m focal length I have coupled with 6.45 micron pixels.