Quote:
Originally Posted by Eric Hahl
My suggestions....
Get yourself a smaller, imaging refractor, something in the 70 to 90mm range and short focal length...say, less than 600mm. An ED doublet will work great and not be expensive. A APO triplet is even better but more $.
Next, get German Equatorial mount or even some of the new sky tracker type mounts to try it out, see if you like it.
A one shot color camera is your friend while learning, no messing around with various filters to add color.
Start out small, see where it leads, you may hate it, lol.
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I'll step in and disagree completely. Eric is a refractor guy, and when you own a hammer, everything looks like a nail
That being said, I have my first refractor arriving this week...it'll be clipped onto my new Super Polaris, old school baby!
Ehem, back to the subject at hand. You have a 5 inch SE GoTo telescope, which 15 years ago (even 10 years ago) would have been out of the question for 75% of telescope owners, yet we were doing all sorts of imaging back then. Those mounts are perfectly capable of finding and following objects, and allowing planetary imaging.
The weak points in your setup:
The 5 inch SE was the smaller, weaker mount, shared with the 4 inch. The 6/8 used a larger heavier mount. If you like how that scope works (how the keypad works, etc) then you can buy a used 6/8 inch mount, and put your 5 inch scope on it. You'll end up with a mount that is oversized for the scope. You can find them for, oh, $250-300.
Also, you can then upgrade when the time comes since it uses a Vixen dovetail, so it's easy to toss an 8 inch Cassegrain on there later.
Then, change to one of the 5MP fast cameras (Celestron Neximage 5 or Orion StarShoot 5), they're basically the same camera. I see them used regularly in the $90 range. The SVBONY item you have is a 10bit A-D converter, which is part of why Jupiter is blown out.
Finally, you need to buy either a 3x barlow, or a tele-extender housing. You need to get that image of Jupiter BIGGER. Either you use a barlow to simply increase your focal length by 2-3x, or you use a tele-extender with a simple eyepiece to project a much bigger image on the camera chip.
Otherwise, I'll sell you a $1500-2000 package right now that will let you start to image nebula and galaxies. However, just ask Eric how much time, blood and money he's tossed at it to get where he is now.
Here's a picture showing Jupiter in your camera (under ideal conditions), with your scope, the red box. Now, go to a 5MP Celestron/Orion and a 2x barlow, you get the yellow box (with your scope). Find a 3x barlow and you get the green box. Now, that image of Jupiter looks a bunch better, since it's now covering lots more pixels. Also, you can bin them 3x3 at that range, which makes the raw files tiny and the transfer instant, so your camera can run in burst mode. Grab 1000 images, pick the best 20 and put them together, and you can get high end style imaging.
