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Old 29-05-2023, 07:43 PM
Didge (Gary)
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Didge is offline
 
Join Date: Feb 2023
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 7
Hi Mark,
Its not such a long time since I asked myself the same question, so I hope I can offer some advice based on my own experience

The main thing that will guide your decision about a suitable camera is your telescope. It's very important to match your camera to your telescopes focal length, otherwise you run the risk of your images being oversampled or undersampled.

Oversampled images dont make the best use of the light falling on your sensor - that requires more light to achieve the same contrast as an optimally sampled image.

Undersampled images tend to saturate your stars, which look pixelated and blocky.

Thankfully, it's really easy to calculate the best pixel size for optimal sampling - its based on the diffraction of light around the inner surface of the telescope aperture, and the seeing conditions at your location.

So - for your Stellarvue at 714mm focal length, these are the optimum pixel size for different seeing conditions :-

Seeing = 1 Superb 1.34
Seeing = 2 Excellent 2.68
Seeing = 2.5 Average 3.36
Seeing = 3 Fair 4.03
Seeing = 4 Poor 5.37

You would probably aim for 'average' seeing of about 2.5, which give you optimal sampling with 3.36 um pixels - which is about the size of the pixels in several ZWO cameras.

My advice is **definitely* to start off with a good quality **cooled** colour camera with pixels of about 3.6 um, such as a ZWO 071MC.

Mono imaging with filter wheels etc is a quantum leap in complexity compared to SLR or OSC imaging - it presupposes years of experience capturing images and post-processing them.

You will get much better images and have a lot more fun with an OSC camera, which will give you an opportunity to develop the skills you need before progressing on to mono imaging.

I recently got a CEM70 by the way - and love it.

I hope that helps,

Gary
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