Quote:
Originally Posted by rogerg
Interesting aspect to consider. How would someone work calculate the SNR of their images and the desired SNR to aim for?
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Since the aim in amateur imaging is usually to create "pretty pictures", there's probably not much point in going beyond "it looks nice/smooth enough" for most of us.
Although I have no direct experience or knowledge of it, I'd imagine that SNR for deep space imaging would be similar in principle to any other imaging:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_...ratio_(imaging)
The signal would be the photon flux from the targeted deep space object. Noise would be everything else such as CCD sources (read noise, dark noise, non-linearity, quantisation), optical system losses and imperfections, sky background (light pollution, light from other objects), and so on.
I'm sure the theory for this would be well established in the professional astronomy literature by now. Perhaps those with a bit of expert knowledge in the area might be able to help us out?