Put it this way Matt. I have all the above mentioned books along with many others. Some are great, some were a waste of money. Not that they weren't good books, but it depended on my level of skill and knowledge as to how useful they were to me.
If you have limited experience with the underpinning knowledge of astrophotography; ie do you know the difference between prime focus, afocal, positive projection, negative projecting and how they effect your exposure time, f ratio and image size, how long you can expose with say a 100mm lens at -75 deg dec and not get star trails using a fixed tripod, how to determine angular field of views based on chip size, how to select the right lens or telescope for the object you are trying to image etc, then I would suggest the original Michael Covington book (Swinborne Uni use it as their prefered text for the HET609 Astrophotography and CCD Imaging subject). If you have all these down pat (and more) and want to really get deep than go for the HAIP book.
It comes down to a one point really, which book will you keep coming back to to get information from. For detailed CCD testing and the science behind it, then HAIP, for Photoshop tutorials - Photoshop Astronomy, for general astrophotography how to, and mine is starting to get pretty dog eared, Astrophotography for the Amateur.
None of the others give the basic foundation of Astrophotography in a straight forward easy to follow way as Covingtons first book.
JMO
|