Quote:
Originally Posted by CometGuy
The other point is that once you venture past 60 degrees solar elongation you are competing against the big professional surveys so chances of success a quite a bit less. IMO the area of sky an amateur should concentrate on is in the region 35-70 degrees from the sun.
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Yes - but they publish the fields that they cover and a quick look at the weather radar will tell if they (SSS) can see anything that night! Obviously this is where automation will help as you can adjust your observign on the fly.
I'm a little concerned that it would take you all day to calibrate and combine your images - have you tried something like Astrometrica? Do you combine your images into FITs format? (Astromatrica has a womderful track, stack and blink facility as well as an overlay to identify all moving objects currently held int eh MPCORB.dat file from the MPC). Even though my images are 1.6mp each in size I can process 100 in under 20 minutes.
Cheers
PS - I'm thinking about buying an EOS 400D, hooking it up to my 4" SCT at f/6.3 and piggy back on my 14" for the occassional 'survey'. That setup would give me 1d x 2d field and it would be interesting to know how deep it could go inside say 4 minutes. Each field would be 6 minutes (including slew and settle) so thats 5d x 2d per hour (given 2 images per field per hour)......