Astrophotography preference CCD or DSLR cameras which is better for taking star pictures?
Question by discoverthetruth: Astrophotography preference CCD or DSLR cameras which is better for taking star pictures?
While becoming interested in astrophotography I wounder aloud should I use a CCD momochrome with color filters, a color CCD or a DSLR camera.
I only want to take star pictures so a cross functional DSLR camera would have to out perform ccd options for it to qualify as a choice.
My budget is 5000 for getting started. Camera, telescope, filters and laptop if possible.
Thanks
Best answer:
Answer by injanier
The CCD astro camera will outperform a DSLR on the sky. The main advantages of the DSLR are that you can use it without a computer, and it’s available for normal photography also. At the low end of the price range, the DSLR will also give you more pixels, but this is not necessarily a good thing. The tiny pixels in small-format DSLRs are not well-matched to the image scale of most telescopes, and will be considerably noisier than the larger pixels in an astrocamera.
The advantages of the CCD astrocamera include lower noise, better H? sensitivity (H? is the red light that dominates many emission nebulae), and better integration with your image processing software.
The use of filters will complicate things slightly, but also add more options, like using narrowband filters to bring out the contrast of nebulae. You can always shoot in plain monochrome to start with.
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One Comment
A DSLR is capable of producing excellent results through a telescope or through its own lenses. They produce much wider views than ccd’s but to take pictures of nebulae or galaxies requires the use of a good mount and long exposures. Dedicated ccds can produce detail in images far more quickly than dslr’s but most tend to be very low resolution and have to have a very accurate tracking system to prevent star trails. Overall, high quality ccd’s are by far the better of the two but a high quality ccd would take most of your budget. For just taking pictures of stars you would be better off buying a dslr and a fast telescope. By this I mean a telescope with a fast focal ratio, about f5. The focal ratio is very important when using any sort of camera with a telescope. The higher the “f” number, the longer it takes for the pixels on the chip to saturate and record detail. When it comes to astrophotography this is more inportant than magnification. Hope this helps you.
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