Seeting on a digital camera for astrophotography.

[HSK (Tom)]

Hi, It's Tom.

I have a 8 mega pixel Canon digital camera (Ixy Digital 910is) http://www.plemix.com/camera-canon-ixy910-camera

To take pictures just as it is from view of the telescope, what kind of settings do I need to set such as brightness and ISO ect? At the moment the planets come out too bright. Such as Jupiter. I can see it's gaseous clouds through telescope but when I take the picture it comes out as bright as a star and can't see any clouds.
So what kind of setting do I need to set?


This is the picture taken by my camera with brightness right down.

Thanks

Tom

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Planet seem to be very bright, you may need to insert a moon filter or double polarising filter to reduce the light level.

The picture also has a lot of camera noise and will need to take either video or multiple images of jupiter using Registax or the like.

I recently experimented by placing my dust cover over my DOB and only opened he cap and that was enoiugh reduction to give me the right level.

Interesting to know what scope you are using.

It is really a matter of experimenting, easy to do with digital. Good luck with it.

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by HSK

This is the picture taken by my camera with brightness right down.

Can you use spot metering and make Jupiter the subject? The large area of dark confuses the camera and overexposes the real target.

[OzRob (Rob)]

I think you will struggle to get Jupiter and its moons to be correctly exposured at the same time. I would play with the exposure times first to get the moons visible then separtately get the correct exposure for Jupiter. You can the use masking in PS to get a single image with Jupiter and the moons correctly exposed.

[that_guy (Tony)]

Originally Posted by mswhin63

Planet seem to be very bright, you may need to insert a moon filter or double polarising filter to reduce the light level.

The picture also has a lot of camera noise and will need to take either video or multiple images of jupiter using Registax or the like.

I recently experimented by placing my dust cover over my DOB and only opened he cap and that was enoiugh reduction to give me the right level.

Interesting to know what scope you are using.

It is really a matter of experimenting, easy to do with digital. Good luck with it.

Yeah, it looked good with telescope (8" Dob) with the dust cover on but it is just not same when I take picture of it. I'll definitely get moon filter but not now. I got some experimenting to do now.

Thanks all for replies.

Tom

Oops, I used my brother's account.