Which telescope to buy?? (help)

Hi all,

I'm completely confused.At the moment I have a Celestron Starhopper 8" on a dob mount but over the last few months have gotten interested in astrophotography and as you all know dobs are not ideal for this.I'm looking at the Celestron C8n(haven't decided whether to get the goto version or not) but now i'm leaning toward the 10" version.There both on CG5 mounts but in another post someone said they had trouble with this and that there was a slight delay in rejustment.This is a big investment to me so I don't want to regret it in a few months.Any advice at all much appreciated.I probably will upgrade at some stage to goto


Joanna

Joanna,

Before you buy any gear for astrophotography, I'd strongly recommend that you read "The New CCD Astronomy". It's the bible of astrophotography. Has loads of useful tips, far too many to mention here. Well worth buying.
www.newastro.com/newastro/default.asp

Regards,

Thanks for the info but at the moment i'm using an ordinary digital camera and not a ccd but i'll take a look at the link. By the way congrats on your project.I'll have to wait to go to work on monday as i've only got dialup (broadband in work) but i did have a look at the construction during the week


Clear skies

Joanna PLEASE don't rush out and buy anything straight away. There is a huge amount you need to consider. I know you are excited and want to start taking photos as soon as you can. However its easy to make a mistake which you will regret later.

The C10 is a great scope but a big one. Just consider that you will have to lift this onto the mount everytime you want to use it. Also consider that being so big, even relatively light winds will buffet it about and smear your shots.

The first piece of advice I would give you about astrophotography is that big isnt always best. You can often get better results with a smaller instrument. Thats contrary to what you would expect with visual astronomy. For example I often get better results with my 80mm refractor than i do with my 9.25" schmidt-cassegrain.

For getting high resolution detailed shots of the moon and planets there is really only one way to go nowaday and that is to use a webcam, yes you read right, a WEBCAM! There is free software available which takes a look at the individual frames of a webcam video and selects the best ones and then stacks them together to make an incredible image of the moon or planet. Webcams are cheap and will give far better results than any single shot camera can. The software is called registax and can be downloaded from

registax.astronomy.net/

As for taking photos of nebulas and other objects farther away, well thats a completely different matter. First your camera need to be capable of taking VERY long exposures often of the order of 10's of minutes!! Now you have the problem of ensuring that your telescope mount stays tracking perfectly during that exposure. Even the tiniest movement (that you wouldn;t even see if you were looking through the scope) can ruin your image. So you need to employ a method of guiding the shot. This often involves using computers and more software.

I'm not trying to scare you away, on the contrary, astrophotography can be the most rewarding pastime there is. You just need to know that there is a hell of a lot more to it than putting a camera to the scope and 'snapping away'

So what I'm really saying is take your time, read all you can, there's a huge volume of info on these boards and around the internet in general. Read as much as you can. Get some books, read them and read them again!! Come here and ask any questions at all. People here will be only too happy to help.

....and most of all, enjoy it!!