Quote:
Originally Posted by avandonk
The chain as I see it is
DSLR
Modded DSLR
Peltier cooled modded DSLR
One shot colour cooled CCD
Dedicated astro cooled Mono CCD
There is no easy answer as all these cameras will give decent results but the quality gets better assuming competence in collecting and processing the data as you go up the chain.
Quality has two components the main one is signal to noise. Once you have very good signal to noise then greater dynamic range can be a decider.
Bert
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That's a really long chain, whilst I agree with the sentiment that you may need to creep up on mono cooled CCD's experiencewise, you could easily omit some of those steps if you know that you're going to end up at the ultimate stage anyway.
This will save you money in the long run.
Here's my thoughts on the subject.
If you're interested in imaging you probably already have a DSLR and are frustrated with the lack of sensitivity.
Get a small chip monoCCD first, preferably one with internal guiding (SBig or QSI). The advantages of the internal guiding chip should remove some of the most frustrating parts of imaging. Unless you have a superb mount, you'll need to guide. Internal guiding is preferable to external because of the flexure problems of external guide setups, I class the QSI off-axis as internal guiding, it has the advantage of guiding in front of the filters, but the disadvantage of having to buy another guide camera. This will allow you to do medium focal length imaging of large targets to hone your skills and see how much you like it.
Next stage is a larger chip as not all targets will fit on the smaller chips. Larger chips require a flat field etc, so they aren't so forgiving of optical errors.
Then think about upgrading the scope/mount to work at different focal lengths.
Then look at adaptive optics, unless you've got a PME by this stage, then OAG for the SBig cameras.
By this stage you'll have to have spent (I hate to calculate this) about $9k to $15k depending on the size of camera you get.
If you go through the steps above, you'll spend
DSLR - $1k
Modded DSLR - $2k-$3k
Peltier cooled modded DSLR - +$1k?
OSC CCD - $2k - $3k
Mono CCD - $3k - ????
So that's spending about $7k to get to the same stage as mentioned above, of which you should get about half back from selling the unused equipment.
It really comes down to the question of how serious you are with imaging, if you are only going to dabble then a DSLR is best, if you pine for better, more detailed images then mono CCD is best. The learning curve can be steep, but the images rewarding. If you've got a small local community to learn off that can help greatly.
Cheers
Stuart