Great capture, I like it

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thanks

These are extremely good shots. When I gain some money I'll have to get back into astrophotography. I've had some trouble regarding digital noise artifacts from the CCD. How do you tackle this? Also what mounting mechanism are you using? And finally what kind of scope do you own, for which you have used in other photographs.

It would be interesting to see the northern sky someday. Keep up the excellent work.

~jt

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The Comment Revolution • My Gallery • Rand

Darkframe subtraction will help to eliminate these artifacts. By taking an equal exposure with the lens covered, you can subtract that darkframe from the original image to remove noise or heat signatures.

I use a Meade LX200 f/6.3 SCT. It is mounted via a fork mount on a Meade Superwedge on a custom pier.

Currently I don't use a CCD camera, I use a Canon XTi (10.2mp) DSLR. So far, it has the lowest ISO noise and has NO amp glow. So removing extra artifacts are easy. You can also use the Photoshop plugin called Astronomy Tools by Noel Carboni. They help to eliminate a plethora of artifacts and to help enhance your images when your sky conditions are less than satisfactory (like mine).

I wouldn't mind having the Orion Starshoot Deepsky Imager....but from what I read on the Orion website, they no longer offer this camera for sale.

Heh, same telescope I used to use. In the past I've used Maxlm DL to process shots, but perhaps the Photoshop plugin will also come in handy.

Thank you for the information though. It will come in handy in the future.

~jt

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The Comment Revolution • My Gallery • Rand

NP. how did you like your scope? I love it... easier to use and easy to lug around when traveling if necessary. Although I wouldn't mind owning my friends 25.5" SCT f/6.3.

It was a good scope in the end for me. Ours is donated towards my old high school now, fork mounted in a rolling roof shed on a free-standing pillar. The only thing it truly needs is some darker skies, but otherwise it was a terrific scope and pretty good to use for CCD imaging. Your friend sounds like he has it working for him though. I also had a friend whose scope I yearned for, I believe it was a 12" reflector. I Can't recall the focal length, but it was a beautiful piece of equipment and made some excellent shots.

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The Comment Revolution • My Gallery • Rand

I understand that. Another friend of mine wanted to sell me his 12" LX200 with the observatory and pier for something like $2500 new. He couldn't use it anymore because of back problems...but I wasn't able to come up with the funds. So my old astronomy teacher bought it instead

Beautiful!

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