Hello,
My name is Greg Bradley and this is my first post in this group.
I frequent the Meade Melbourne Group and others but its nice to have
an Aussie forum and its distinctly in your face style.
Here is a link to my images site:
http://tinyurl.com/2fyepd
I can relate to a lot of your posts as I also have not been doing this "that" long - about 3 years now, starting with a Meade LX90 (a lot of fun).
I have done a lot of imaging with DSLRs and have modified quite a few.
Colour balancing with a stock DSLR is a little tricky depending on the model. But stock standard they tend to be baised towards the blue and inhibited in the red.
This is because the chips are sensitive to UV as well as Infrared and the filter in front of the DSLR chip is called a hot mirrored filter and reflects the UV and IR components.
With these removed you increase the red sensitivity many times and the general sensitivity of the camera about 2.5 times.
When processing modified cameras it helps to have a custom white balance which is a shot of a Photographic 18% grey card ( about $20 from a photographic store) taken at midday in sunlight. That handles a lot of the red bias.
The new Canon 40D seems to be a lot more sensitive to the red than any other camera I have seen used and also has a 14 bit converter (Sbig and others use 16 bits ie. 65535 shades of grey, 14 bit is about 1400 or so, 12 bit is 256 so its quite a jump).
I have been thinking about getting a Canon 40D recently as it is such a leap forward for DSLRs. Probably the first major improvement over the venerable 350D.
Balancing colour is a tricky subject and one that I am not particularly expert in as I tend to process my images too saturated in colour and have to show restraint! Some use G2V stars and process until they look white. Most though use the histogram feature in Photoshop that shows the histograms of each colour channel and you can easily see which one is biased and then pull it back using curves or levels. Auto-colour in Photoshop always seems to make images too green to me.
I had to laugh about the post about the Tak 6 inch refractor on a Tak mount winning competitions. Funny, I have one of those and was thinking of upgrading!
Oh well, everyone has their own viewpoint otherwise life would be dull indeed.
Nice to be a newbie on this group.
Greg.