[ausastronomer (John Bambury)]

Hi all,

Well, I am normally offering advice in this section but I am a complete novice at astrophotography with a digital camera so I need some guidance.

I have an 18" Obsession which has argo navis and servocat (alt az tracking), which I wish to use for taking short exposure astrophotographs of moon planets and brighter DSO's, with my Canon 400D digital camera. I have all the accessories I need to attach the camera to the telescope and the camera to my Pentax XW eyepieces. I am aware that because of the alt/az tracking of the mount, I am limited to short exposure images because of field rotation.

My main question revolves around getting the camera to do its thing.

If I want to take say 50 x 3 sec exposures at a given ISO setting, how do I tell the camera to do this. I am used to the camera taking 1 exposure every time I press the shutter. Do I need to connect the camera to my laptop and do I need some special software on my laptop? I have Photoshop CS2 for processing and the proprietary Canon software, but that's about all. Do I need some other software to get the image focused properly ?

CS-John B