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Old 04-07-2007, 11:55 AM
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iceman (Mike)
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Gosford, NSW, Australia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nathan25 View Post
- How would things be different if i was primarily interested in photographing planets? (which i'm not, but i'd like to keep things capable all round if i can)
The C8 is quite capable of being a planetary imaging scope. You'd need a barlow lens (2x, 3x, 4x, 5x etc) to increase your focal length/image scale, and a webcam. Budget webcams like the ToUcam 900nc are perfect to start with. (max $200)

Quote:
- Can you tell me more about guidescopes? I'm quite unfamiliar.
A guidescope is a 2nd scope, either smaller or bigger, which is uses to help keep the tracking accurate. You align the guidescope on a star, and in it's simplest form, with an illuminated reticle, you keep that star centered by using the hand controller to make minor adjustments if you tracking is not 100% accurate (no mount is 100%).
You can automate things by putting a webcam in the guidescope and feeding the star image to a program which, judging by the direction of star drifting, will send corrections to the mount so that it automatically makes the adjustments for you. You need a mount that is capable of automatic guiding. I don't know if the C8 is.

Quote:
- What's involved with processing astrophotography? Software etc etc
The best all-round software is Photoshop, but it's not cheap. There are other tools such as Iris, Images Plus, Maxim DL, AstroArt and others. There's been a few threads discussing it so go searching and prepare to do some reading

Quote:
- Are there any good general guides to astrophotography out there?
There's a few books out there, search for books + astrophotography on IIS and again there's a few threads discussing people's favourites.


Hope that helps! Good luck!
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