Digital Cameras Telescopes
what digital camera is recommended for astrophotography ?
I want to take pictures of the moon through my telescope, I want to know what would be a reasonable priced slr digital camera and what other accessories are needed? And a simple guide on how to go about taking lunar pics
Any of your more popular dSLRs would be capable of shooting the moon through a telescope, and so would some non-dSLR cameras as well. You don’t need an expensive full-frame camera to get good shots, nor do you need long exposure times for the moon, though you will need some sort of an equatorial tracking mount for your optics if you get seriously into shooting deep sky objects. Roughly, that would be anything outside our own solar system. After all, the moon is itself just a sunlit object, though a rather dark one.
You will also need some features of your camera that you don’t normally use, beginning with mirror lockup if your camera has such a feature. You will also need a remote shutter release for your camera or, failing that, the ability to delay your shutter release for a couple of seconds after you actually trip the shutter. These features allow the vibrations in the camera and mount to settle down between the time you trip the shutter release and the time the camera actually takes a picture. The mirror lockup reduces the amount of vibrations from the movement of the reflex mirror just before the shutter opens. I have found the live view feature on my Canon 40D helpful for focusing and to further reduce the vibration from the shutter curtains. Most likely, you will have to use manual exposure. Full auto, let alone scene modes, are out of the question. Your aperture is also fixed by the telescope’s optics, so you can’t use P or Tv (program or shutter priority) exposure control either. And of course you will need a way to couple your camera body to the telescope, but camera to T-mount and T-mount to scope eyepiece adapters are commercially available.
For ISO 100, an exposure of 1/60 second at f/8 or so would be a good place to start, with adjustments from there based on what your LCD monitor and histogram display tell you. You can figure your f-stop by dividing your telescope’s focal length by the diameter of its objective lens.
Star Trails over the Canada France Hawaii Telescope
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