Sunday, 22 September 2013

CCD in telescopes: Observation and Astro-photography

You will typically find that CCD cameras are sold separately to the telescopes. That way the telescope can be used visually or for astrophotography, by either fitting an eyepiece, or a camera. Most telescopes do ship with eyepieces, as they are much less expensive than a CCD and it is sort of expected, but most observers will typically replace this eyepiece with a better one anyway, so to all intents and purposes, when you buy a telescope you are just buying the Optical Tube Assembly and maybe a mount, and you add to that all the accessories you need to accomplish your objectives. Different CCDs will be used for different purposes, for instance planetary observations or deep space objects.



That telescope has a fork mount. Note that this constrains how much equipment you can put on the end of the telescope without getting in the way of the mount. It also is an Alt-Az mount, which means it is not polar aligned; stars will rotate in the field of view, requiring a field de-rotator in addition to a CCD.



It looks like a nice enough scope for visual observations, but if you are interested in astrophotography, you might want to hold off for a bit, maybe get a scope for visual use first, and maybe make use of well-set-up robotic astrographs that you can hire over the internet, like slooh.com and itelescope.net - get some experience using premium gear that you don't have to worry about setting up or maintaining, and while you do that, work out what gear you will be happy about getting for yourself. The fact you are asking this question about CCDs suggests you aren't yet ready to spend money on astrophotography gear...



Getting set up well for visual stuff can set you back hundreds... Getting set up for astrophotography can set you back many thousands, so you want to be well equipped to make good purchasing decisions. And you can rent a lot of time on some pretty good telescopes for that same $...

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