When are better cameras and lenses worth the money?
Disclaimer: Rank Newbie opinions. Relationship to fact may be tenuous at best..
There’s often a bit of chat here about the “best camera” for astro beginners, so I thought I’d take some test shots with two cameras that were widely different in price and see if I could pick much difference.
So - just out of interest - here’s a few shots of the same area of sky, taken with different cameras. One is a 600D - an older and inexpensive entry level Canon DSLR and the other is a much more expensive Canon 7D Mk2 (which I usually use for wildlife).. The main difference in this case is the ISO range. The 600D only goes to ISO 6,400 while the 7D Mk2 goes up to 16,000. But does it make much difference?
Well, apparently it depends….
In my case, mostly not. I mainly want to make simple maps of areas of sky that contain a complete constellation - such as Scorpius - that I can crop down and use for a study guide while I learn the positions and patterns of the key stars and any objects of interest. I don’t really mind if the shots are a bit noisy as I’m not shooting to frame the pictures or enter competitions.
I like using programs like Stellarium and SkySafari alongside my own photos because I can adjust them all (e.g. by zooming, lightening and darkening, etc) until they come close to matching what I can see through a telescope. The better the view the more white dots you can see in a given area and the harder I find the task of picking out which are the key stars that determine the pattern for a particular constellation. So it’s good to have some shots with less detail to compare with more crowded ones to help me cope with the pattern recognition.
However, where a more capable camera might come in handy is shooting through a “slower” telescope than the 200mm lens used in some of the attached pictures. For instance, that 200mm lens is an F4 which is reasonably fast, but telescopes can vary a great deal from quick to very slow. And with higher magnifications you get less time to take the shot before the stars go out of shape. So being able to crank the ISO up and use shorter exposure times could be useful - provided the noise levels weren’t outrageously high. The usable ISO ranges have increased dramatically on many newer DSLRs, so that could be just the excuse I need to buy another new camera…that I don’t really need.. Or not…
All the pictures below are single shots with no stacking or post processing (with the exception of some lightening in the one widest photo. No.2). In the closer shots I’ve circled the key stars in the Corona to make it easier to compare with the wider views. All the closer shots are taken with the EF 70 - 200mm F4 lens at 200mm (a good quality L series lens) . Is there really much difference between 3, 4, and 5? Does an expensive lens really make much difference when the subject is white dots on a black background? For what I need, the cheaper gear seems just fine, but perhaps things will change if and when I ever get around to the business of attempting some tracking and stacking??
Photos:
A screenshot from SkySafari 5 showing the main stars in the Corona Australis, which is a group of stars (in Sagittarius) that currently sit below the tail of the scorpion (in the constellation Scorpius), round about mid evening. The Corona looks rather like the sort of laurel wreath that Julius Caesar is often depicted wearing. It also looks a bit like a horseshoe.
A wide shot of Corona Australis taken with a Canon 600D and an inexpensive 18-55mm kit lens at 18mm.
Canon 600d ISO 6400 at 2 secs 200mm lens
Canon 7D Mk2 ISO 6400 at 2 secs 200mm lens
Canon 7D Mk2 ISO 12800 at 1 second 200mm lens (double the ISO, and half the exposure time)
A close crop from a shot with Canon 7D Mk2 ISO 16000 at 2 secs. Very noisy at that degree of crop and ISO, but at least you can see the Globular Cluster is more than a single star. A shot taken through a 150/750 Newtonian telescope came out looking very similar as far as detail (or lack of it) went.
If you want to see a really good picture of NGC 6723 with some nice BIG white dots then check this out.
I shoot almost exclusively using a DSLR and 70-200 f2.8 on a regular tripod. Nobody NEEDS expensive gear to do astrophotography. My experience is people have unrealistic expectations about whats involved in astrophotography and just like in photography many people expect to just hit a button and get an award winning photo. If YOU don't understand what factors influence a photo (start with exposure triangle and comprehend it thoroughly) then you'll forever capture below what you're capable of with your gear. The word "need" pisses me off when people use it, because its often bad advice. There are ways around what the expensive gear gives you that let you take great shots with what you have right now, today, no more to pay, etc etc. "Want" is often the more appropriate word to use. Nobody NEEDS a tracking mount, they WANT to aim for one because its better than without, but NEED implies its required, but it isnt. Numbers are useless too, dont get hung up over ISO numbers particularly, as they are wrong anyway plus every physical sensor of the same chip will have its own characteristics and will change for any iso setting with local temperature etc too. ignore all the specs crap you can get around all that, ignore megapixels or sensors size they are all meaningless, you can do astrophotography with a cameraphone and jpegs, sure it limits how far you can push the data but its NOT impossible to work with.
Also the definition of astrophotography I dont think is well understood and misused, just as it is with photography. Too many people go buy a DSLR and then declare themselves as "photographers" and they just havent a clue. Their photos scream "idiot" to everyone else too.
What the more expensive lenses/OTAs give you is better light transmission with less distortion. Photography is about capturing photons and astrophotography in particular you're capturing very few photons and want to maximise the chance of capturing them. Part of that can involve a more sensitive sensor or a larger aperture or longer exposure time. Because astrophotography signal is often so very faint we try to maximise every factor to make the most of the capture session. Part of this is could be throwing money at more gear, but this has no limit really, there are "good value" options which a newbie would say were very expensive, but for what they allow they really arent. Part of it is what and how you capture, using lots of data, often hours of captures and how you then process it all. Its NOT a one click process to get a great pic of nebulosity or galaxies, if it was then you are still miles away from what that one click solution will give you by using multiple "one clicks" and aligning/stacking etc. Part of getting a good pic is the software and YOUR workflow with it. Ultimately it all just takes work and effort to get a really good pic, yes its possible to get a quick easy good pic with good gear, but that same gear with a bit of effort will yield a spectacular pic and is wasted in the hands of someone unwilling or incapable of using it to its fullest. Like buying a ferrari doesnt give you the skill to drive it.
Brands, nope keep away from the flame wars, Canon and Nikon both make great cameras and lenses neither is better than the other. Period. Canon have been more friendly towards astrophotography with some specific models while Nikon are new at doing this. Again this doesn't mean you can't use Nikon (I do) but across the history of both makers Canon generally comes out ahead. A different between them is the distance in their camera bodies between the focal plane (where the film or sensor sits to accept photons) and the lens mount. In Canon bodies there is a bit more room and so "in body" clip-in filters became available to help astrophotographers while only recently these have appeared for some Nikon models, so again on the whole Canon is a better choice. Its nothing to do with ISO or camera features or better brands, there are simply slightly more options available to Canon than Nikon for astrophotographers to capitalise on in their astrophotography.
What a more expensive DSLR gives you over an entry level DSLR is more camera features/control. But if you dont learn and understand them all you get is a slight different in noise and megapixels. As processing is about reducing noise and increasing signal any little improvement to the foundation of your capture train can give you big gains in the final image in terms of detail and contrast . A big heavy tracking mount will be less effected by tiny vibrations and track accurately, good quality optics reduces lost photons and distortion and a good camera captures a truer more sensitive image without introducing noise to the signal.
The cheap crap gear will give you a potential image of maybe 90% (0 being no image, 100 being best possible in existence), certaintly plenty for facebook. Like building a car to do 200kph is pretty easy for even cheap makers. adding 5% on top though takes exponentially more skill to achieve, getting to 99.9% is almost impossible and I don't think humanity has done that with astrophotography yet. Thats what paying the money for extra gear gets you is fractions of a percent better results IF YOU put in the effort.
In my experience, with DSLRs, some equipment considerations are very important. Sure anyone can stick a camera on a tripod and aim it at the Milky Way, and probably get something that looks reasonable at first glance. Sadly, many standard DSLR lenses are just not up to the optical quality required for good colour rendition and dispersion control, and this shows up when your trying to process these images. To improve performance you need to go to premium lenses, preferably with ED glass elements, and good optical design to eliminate coma, donuts, etc across the field of view. To get this sort of optical quality usually requires spending some money. Also many of the supposedly fast wide angle lenses cannot actually be used at fast settings for wide field astro photography, they require stopping down to try and clean up the distortion. And shooting at f7, as opposed to say f2.8, is going to force you to use much longer subs which increases the risk or star trailing, or introduces the need for a tracking mount of some kind. As to ISO, it is important for many of the older model DSLRs still in peoples closets, and often the high ISO setting means high noise levels. Sure you can try and process out the noise, but darks and bias frames shot at high ISO setting can have problems as well.
So its not as simple, imho, as suggested below. It is simple to get started with a DSLR and a tripod, until you look closely or try to enlarge it.
Disclaimer: Rank Newbie opinions. Relationship to fact may be tenuous at best..
I mainly want to make simple maps of areas of sky that contain a complete constellation - such as Scorpius - that I can crop down and use for a study guide while I learn the positions and patterns of the key stars and any objects of interest.
In that case you'd do a lot better to read a few astronomy books and study Sky Safari more carefully before rushing outside and banging away at random with a lot of gear pointlessly.
Secondly think carefully about why you are doing this and what you hope to get out of it.
You don't need whopping great DSLRs to record the constellations - see for example https://www.dpreview.com/galleries/7...06188/p1010566
- the camera and exposure details are provided. No tracking, no tripod, camera was perched on a rock.
In that case you'd do a lot better to read a few astronomy books and study Sky Safari more carefully before rushing outside and banging away at random with a lot of gear pointlessly.
It's not pointless - it's called trial and error, and it's quite a popular way to learn. Some people like to follow other people's paths and others like to jump in at the deep end and see what they can find out for themselves.
Interesting, however why would someone shot at the night sky at 16000 IS0 for 2 seconds.
Just to see what happens Leon. Now I know.
The top end of the ISO range on cameras keeps pushing further and further out, yet for the regular photography that I do I never go anywhere near it. So it was interesting to experiment.
Thanks Sil and Glen for your thoughtful replies. You make some good points.
I have been really enjoying the business of learning to navigate my way around the night sky and, along the way, getting a feel for where an interest in astronomy might take me.
So far, it seems likely that I won't get into the sort of deep space astrophotography that you see examples of elsewhere on this forum. My interest in photographing the sky is more along the lines of general photography that happens to have stars in it.
But I have enjoyed testing out the photographic gear that I already own to see what can be done with it.
Glen’s final point seemed to nail the matter very succinctly. He said:
“It is simple to get started with a DSLR and a tripod, until you look closely or try to enlarge it”.
The main decision that I need to make is how far down that line of quality in the fine detail that I’d like to go. Or to put it another way - how fussy am I likely to get?
Obviously, it’s not always possible to predict the path in advance, and indeed discovering and developing your preferences along the way is half the fun. But, so far at least, I’ve not felt any motivation to get into the deeper end of astrophotography. Whether I'd become interested in that aspect was still an unknown when I began, but so far it still looks like I’m unlikely to get into serious tracking, stacking and in depth post-processing. There’s nothing much to be gained by categorically ruling it out for the future, but it’s just not something I’ll be spending either time or money on at this stage.
For me, the main point of taking both wider and moderately closer shots is to help with pattern recognition - which I’m usually pretty weak at. Especially when the patterns involve a few billion white dots.. Some people (my son for instance) are fantastic at retaining visual information, but I’m not. I can look at Stellarium and see the patterns clearly enough and then lose much of the mental picture as soon as I look at the actual night sky. What works (for me) is to keep doing it over and over in different ways until it sticks. I.e. Screenshots from Stellarium and SkySafari (at different rotations) plus my own pictures at different magnifications and rotations, and then the night sky with different scopes and/or eyepieces, etc. Rinse and repeat until it becomes familiar. Some like the Southern Cross and the tail of the Scorpion are easy, but others are requiring a lot of work. But it’s interesting work.
Of course I could use a Goto, and that certainly has a place, but somehow it doesn't seem as satisfying.
Thanks for the input. Suggestions from other posters would also be welcome - especially comments about specific cameras and lenses, and any relevant details of how you found they were better or worse at handling particular settings.
Chris the only way to learn the night sky - for life - is to get your nose out of camera/computer screens and spend quality time outside under a dark sky. Regularly.
Sole companions should be a small refractor (70-80mm) or 7x50 binoculars, and a paper star atlas for your level, such as Nortons which provides a good guide to what's up there (plus the maps).
By the time you can claim to have seen all the things in Nortons (for your latitude) and the Messier objects you'll have learnt your way round.
Chris the only way to learn the night sky - for life - is to get your nose out of camera/computer screens and spend quality time outside under a dark sky. Regularly.
Sole companions should be a small refractor (70-80mm) or 7x50 binoculars, and a paper star atlas for your level, such as Nortons which provides a good guide to what's up there (plus the maps).
By the time you can claim to have seen all the things in Nortons (for your latitude) and the Messier objects you'll have learnt your way round.
Leave the cameras at home.
Hi Wavytone,
I’m glad that we can at least agree on some things.
So far, the majority of my time has been spent doing exactly what you’re recommending. Namely, getting outside almost every night with a small refractor and binoculars.
The fuller story goes like this (Caution, it’s bound to get long…):
After having only a passing interest in the stars for the past 70 years I was outside one night in April this year under particularly pleasant conditions and idly wondered if I could get a photo of the beautiful sky. So I put a camera on a tripod, pointed it upwards and took a few time exposures. Many were failures, but some worked well enough to spark an interest in doing better.
Up until then my only previous attempts at night sky photography had been some basic shots of the moon (see example below showing a neighbour on her way to work…). But I have had many years general experience as a “happy snapper”. Some years ago I joined a flourishing local camera club for a while and was able to regularly do well in their monthly competitions, so I wasn’t a complete novice with a camera. For comparison, I have two good friends who had their own photography business at the time so I was well aware of the size of the gap betwen a reasonably competent hobby dabbler and a professional photographer. Technically, I was nowhere near their league, and I’m still not. What success I was able to achieve at Club level was mostly down to interesting composition and pictorial story telling.
So taking photgraphs of the sky was not a later add on to my interest in astronomy, it was actually the introduction to it.
As mentioned above, my favourite way of working is experimentation - aka trial and error. I have always found that the biggest single factor in mastering anything new is keeping the motivation up. It’s more important than the reading, and more important than the gear you buy. By far the biggest reason that many people drop out before reaching a goal is losing the motivation to keep going and then just drifting away. And what keeps motivation going can be a very personal thing, and will vary from individual to individual. And it’s not always predictable either. Sometimes a flagging interest can be revived by a new book, a fresh mentor or even a new piece of coveted gear. And all those can work for me too. But at the top of my list is the fun of trying a different approach, just to see what happens… So on that first night I didn’t go inside and read a book first, I just experimented with a variety of settings, and then studied the results later to try and learn why the failures failed and the relative successes didn’t.
I certainly do enjoy reading books - we have literally thousands of them in our house - but I prefer to do only a small amount of initial reading - just enough to get a “flavour”, but not to the extent of obediently following a recipe. Then I experiment for a while, make some mistakes and get a little bit of experience. Then when I do the next bit of reading both the jargon and the examples makes a lot more sense. Then I jump back in again…and so on.
A love of jumping in at the deep end and learning to swim before sinking to the bottom has served me very well over the years. For instance, it enabled me to give up working for others and support myself in my own businesses for over half my working life. Another example was that the knowledge that I gained from doing a bit of self-taught handyman work for myself and others, plus paying careful attention when I helped demolish some houses, enabled me to carry out a long standing dream of designing and building our own house. It required learning many different skills that I’d had no formal training in, and some stages were very slow, but it was incredibly satisfying to do, saved us a massive amount of money in costs, and quickly allowed us to be mortgage free. And, thirty years later we still live in it and nothing has fallen apart (with the possible exception of the builder. )…
So I’m not very likely to change my preferred method of working now. I’ve always enjoyed the process of looking at an initial failure and working out how to turn it into a success.
Cheers,
Chris
Pics: Neighbour and moon from some years ago, plus two of the original pics from mid April this year that got me interested in learning the skies. Unprocessed except for downsizing to post. There were also quite a few with major errors, and I still keep one or two just to remind me where it began!
I already owned cameras and tripods, plus a pair of 8x56 binoculars. Stellarium was a free download. That could have kept me going for months if not years with no further expense. But where’s the fun in that? And I don’t have years - my eyesight is already fading quite rapidly - so buying a telescope fairly quickly was inevitable. I bought a basic 80x400 SkyWatcher refractor on an Alt-Az mount for around $300 and went outside night after night for the first two months and began the journey. We live in the bush and have good skies with low light pollution, so conditions were very favourable. Only the onset of winter clouds and rain slowed me down.
I also then bought some books (Turn Left at Orion, Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and The Southern Sky Guide, etc). Plus various collections of charts - one in book form and a number of printable collections. But I found the charts of very little use. Not because they weren’t good, they were, but they just didn’t feel comfortable to work with. I guess we’re all different. By contrast, Stellarium and SkySafari 5 give me all the information that I need in a format that I enjoy using.
I noticed that in your first post you recommended that I “read a few astronomy books and study SkySafari” before going outside, and now you’re recommending that I “get your nose out of camera/computer screens and spend quality time outside under a dark sky. Regularly.” Clearly you like having a bet each way! But as I’ve been doing some of both I don’t think there’s much to argue about there.
I also downloaded (from here) Suzy’s list of Highlights of The Winter Sky and have now been able to view about half of them in the areas that I’ve been gradually learning. So that has helped keep interest and motivation up too. Thanks again to Suzy.
So that’s where I’m up to now. I have added more gear and my most used combination is now a 150x750 Newtonian with the original 80x400 mounted on top. It gives me flexibility in the one package and allows me to put a camera on either one or the other and take reference pictures at the same time that I’m viewing through the other one. I now have other options to back it up, but the main learning path still heavily relies on the little refractor. It usually goes - binoculars and/or SkySafari first, then the biggest chunk of exploring using the little refractor, eventually followed by a closer look through something more powerful.
And taking some more happy snaps of the terrritory along the way is a regular part of it. I’m certainly not going to stop taking pictures, because I find them to be both useful tools plus a good record of the journey. There’s no particular need for high quality pictures for either use, but it would go against the grain not to be using the opportunity to improve the photos along the way.
My learning curve in astrophotography has been very very slow. I did piggy back for most of the 1980's with camera lenses. Nothing changed much technology wise for ages. Then came along DSLR's. However it wasn't until 2012 that I bought a second hand Pentax K-x. I was amazed at how much could be captured with it. But it was a bit of a pain to go longer than 30 seconds without a software mod on the memory card.
I grew out of it pretty fast and purchased a second hand Pentax K-5. Much better than the K-x with lower noise and better results at higher speed. But it was still insensitive to Ha.
Around the same time I bought a quite old Nikon D70s that was full spectrum modified. It had good sensitivity to Ha, being modified, but the amp glow and noise were so bad it made it not really worthwhile.
So now my latest adventure is with an old second hand full spectrum modified Canon 1100D. It is the best of all my cameras so far, even though it is clearly noisier for any given ISO than the the Pentax K-5. Ripping that filter out makes it a beast!
So I'm usually two or three or more steps behind in technology, because I don't have the dollars to get the bleeding edge.
The main thing is, are you having fun? Cos at the end of the day, that's all that matters.
I'm old enough to have photographed most of the sky back in the days of film, with an SLR and fast lenses, and also used a 6" f/5 scope and manually guided exposures and all that.
But this was in an era when (a) the available lens and film technology had basically plateaued for several decades (b) not many were doing similar.
In addition the sensor being film meant that you could always have the latest and greatest sensor by buying a roll - and without having to sell the camera body every time. In this respect digital cameras are distinctly inferior !
These days I don't bother with astro photography because:
- the technology is still evolving rapidly (ie sensors bodies and lenses) to the extent anything you buy is obsolete 3 months after you've got it; either squander a fortune on current gear, or forget it IMHO. Might be ok if you're a professional photographer by day and claim the costs as a tax deduction but for anyone else... no.
- there are so many people banging away with little idea what or why... Many will happily take a photo for you on request, for free, if you have a good reason. So.. let them do it with their gear. Cheapest solution IMHO !
Eventually digital camera technology will hit hard limits imposed by physics (sensors) and optics (lenses) at which point the pace of evolution will slow. At that point it will be much like it was in SLR days.
But there was one thing in the 1980s that has no match digitally - a plate camera that shoots on 4 x 5 glass plates. I had access to one in an observatory with a 100mm aperture f/5 lens ... awesome.
Thank you so much for that very informative post Kevin. Your picture of "6723 and friends" is magnificent! And your willingness to share the details of settings etc on that page is much appreciated.
Your point about having fun is absolutely the key for me. When i began investigating astronomy I had no idea where it would take me. Would I lose interest in a week or two? (No). Would I get an attack of GAS and buy more gear than I really needed? (Yes! However, I've bought a lot less telescopes than I bought guitars when I took that hobby up!). Would I start to get competitive about aspects of it? I.e.Would my inner obsessive come to the fore and insist that I take the best darned deep space pictures you ever saw? (No - which was something of a relief to find out! ).
But I could really only discover the answers by getting started on the hobby and seeing how it went. It was especially interesting to find out that I was unlikely to get into the serious end of astrophotography although I'm learning just enough about it to be able to appreciate the enormous amount of patient dedication and skill that goes into pictures like yours. (I'm currently slowly working my way through the early pages of "Astrophotography" by Thierry Legault).
The path for me involves using a program like SkySafari, my old binoculars, a basic refractor, and then something a little bigger. But once I've found something and "seen" it - no matter how faintly - I'm happy to switch to pictures from other sources to get a closer look. E.g. your picture and the one from the Hubble. I don't feel the need to do the whole journey myself. That was particularly good to discover, because It could easily have gone the other way. It was especially enjoyable to see your splendid picture and to be able to recognise what I was looking at, because I'd been doing some reading about it and had also captured a primitive version of the same subject.
There can be a fine line between dedication and obsession, satisfaction and frustration, and so on. And at this stage of my life I much prefer to keep things fairly casual. At my current level of involvement, there’s nothing about astronomy that needs to be rushed and there’s no finishing line to aim at. No exams, no contests or competitions, and no stress to hit targets. Only - as you sagely recommended - the aim of enjoying the experience. And, so far, that side of things is working very well.
I'm old enough to have photographed most of the sky back in the days of film, with an SLR and fast lenses, and also used a 6" f/5 scope and manually guided exposures and all that.
But this was in an era when (a) the available lens and film technology had basically plateaued for several decades (b) not many were doing similar.
In addition the sensor being film meant that you could always have the latest and greatest sensor by buying a roll - and without having to sell the camera body every time. In this respect digital cameras are distinctly inferior !
Ah film.... I remember when digital cameras were first coming in and the traditionals insisting that it was just a fad and could never match the quality of flim. Much as the vinyl enthusiasts were also insisting that digtal sound was inherently inferior. In both cases the switch was quite fast, although there’s still a small band of diehard enthusiasts for both film and vinyl.
I also recall the frustrations of setting up my first darkroom (in a bedroom cupboard) nearly 60 years ago, and discovering that the shop had sold me the wrong combination of “safe” light and film. The end result of a lot of careful manipulation of chemicals, containers, troughs, timers etc was a roll of blank film! I can’t recall if I ever did get the the right gear on that occasion, but it certainly didn’t stick as a hobby.
Many years later I had the chance to be a founding member of a graphic design and photography business in Melbourne (I was neither a designer nor a photographer, but my business partner was RMIT trained and very good at both.). So I helped build another darkroom and got the chance to watch somebody who really did know what he was doing! We did a bit of corporate work but the main line was Album cover design (nice big record sleeves back then) and publicity photos for clients like Mushroom Records who were just down the road from us. I don’t recall making anything that could reasonably described as money, but we didn’t starve and we had great deal of fun. (Ah, the good old sex and drugs and rock and roll years…. if only I could remember them….. )
And, coincidentally, at that time we found a collection of glass plate negatives left behind in a rental house. We never discovered who the original owner was, and sadly I don’t know where the boxes ended up, but it was an interesting glimpse into the past. The glass plates were 3” x 4” and not in great condition, but the images were surprisingly good. I blew some up to 10x8 but all I still have are a handful of tatty old ‘contacts’ exposed directly onto the paper (sample attached)
Not in the league of the camera you’re describing though!
Ah yes... “When are better cameras and lenses worth the money”. I guess that this is another “How Long is a Piece of String?” question and that the answer just boils down to some version of “They’re only worth the money when you get fussy enough to put a value on the difference, and know enough to be able to take advantage of their potential”.
Nobody has chipped in with any precise answers about a particular piece of gear or magic cluster of settings that allows a quantum leap in quality from A to B So it’s presumably just the usual story then - work, practice, and study - no shortcuts to Nirvana.
Thanks for all the posts and comments.
Cheers,
Chris
Last edited by Nebulous; 23-07-2017 at 01:20 PM.
Reason: add missing words
Just as a matter of interest Chris, digital sound [CD, DVD etc] is
inferior to vinyl, which accounts for rising sales of vinyl and turntables,
and for Sony's recent decision to put out all their future recordings
on vinyl as well as digital. Digital sound is not continuous, coming
in 46 separate sound bites per second, if I remember rightly.
Digital sound is known as "bright", and does not have the depth of
physically produced sound such as a stylus on a vinyl disc. To this
day many music aficionados have very expensive high end turntables.
If it could be arranged to listen to a recording on digital and then
on vinyl, most people would notice that the vinyl has a richer sound.
Turntables disappeared almost entirely for many years, but now
most retailers are stocking them from $50 to many hundreds.
raymo
Just as a matter of interest Chris, digital sound [CD, DVD etc] is
inferior to vinyl, which accounts for rising sales of vinyl and turntables,
and for Sony's recent decision to put out all their future recordings
on vinyl as well as digital. Digital sound is not continuous, coming
in 46 separate sound bites per second, if I remember rightly.
Digital sound is known as "bright", and does not have the depth of
physically produced sound such as a stylus on a vinyl disc. To this
day many music aficionados have very expensive high end turntables.
If it could be arranged to listen to a recording on digital and then
on vinyl, most people would notice that the vinyl has a richer sound.
Turntables disappeared almost entirely for many years, but now
most retailers are stocking them from $50 to many hundreds.
raymo
Or not… 
Some people (my son for instance) are fantastic at retaining visual information, but I’m not. I can look at Stellarium and see the patterns clearly enough and then lose much of the mental picture as soon as I look at the actual night sky. What works (for me) is to keep doing it over and over in different ways until it sticks. I.e. Screenshots from Stellarium and SkySafari (at different rotations) plus my own pictures at different magnifications and rotations, and then the night sky with different scopes and/or eyepieces, etc. Rinse and repeat until it becomes familiar. Some like the Southern Cross and the tail of the Scorpion are easy, but others are requiring a lot of work. But it’s interesting work. 
those old frames
