|
Hi Jeff,
I have used a GStar-EX quite a lot for video astronomy and occultation work.
It is a good cam, although it needs dark field subtraction to keep the hot pixels under control. Nebulosity does this well.
I used mine with an LX90-8" and a 0.65 focal reducer which required me to either keep the max altitude below 65 degrees, or use a 2" diagonal to point the cam so it did not hit the fork base. With this I had a FoV of about 20 arc min.
With Nebulosity to stack, I obtained many excellent images (mainly of galaxies which at the time was my interest).
The LX90 had relatively poor worms in it and it was mounted alt-az, which to the purist is anathema for astro photo work. But this all proved to be an excellent setup; the integration of 2.5 sec was just right for getting maybe 70 % of the images without smear, and the large Periodic Error pushed the camera field of view around enough to wipe out the hot pixels with dark subtraction. If the PE had been much less, the dark subtraction would have left ugly "holes" in the subtracted image ... as it was, the results were very pleasing.
Regards,
Tony Barry
WSAAG
|