I decided to purchase an SBIG ST-8300M to replace the 10D and 5DMkII for astrophotography. Although these camera are amazing performers they just don’t hold up without modifications for deep sky subjects due to their muffled sensitivity to hydrogen-alpha light. I also own an SBIG STV and SBIG ST-5C and the company makes great hardware. The ST-8300 is a bargain when compared with most other dedicated astrophotography cameras and when combined with a filter wheel and good filters you can take extremely high quality pictures for a fraction of what the ultra high-end hardware costs.

This is a picture of the half moon from early in January 2009. This was taken with a Canon 10D through a Takahashi FS102 refractor at prime focus.

There have been a lot of reports of the 5D’s trouble with bright point lights. I recently updated to the new firmware (version 1.0.7) and took some test shots with the 5D Mark II and a Takahashi FS102 refractor. I also wanted to test out the sensitivity at various ISO values. All these pictures were taken from my driveway on a day with fairly bad seeing and transparency. I got out a ladder and threw a blanket over one of the street lights but it didn’t help much with the sky glow.

I recently had some of my old astrophoto slides scanned with a Noritsu slide scanner so I can put them into permanent storage and finally move into 100% digital photography. I’ve learned a lot about image processing and the tools are much better now than they were when I originally took the photos. There are three major changes that affect the quality: The slide scanner is much better (although the lab gave me JPG files instead of 16bit TIFF files, what the hell?

It’s been at least three years since I’ve done any astrophotograpy but last night I lugged out the equipment and shot a few frames. I only made it out as far as the driveway and the sky isn’t very dark in northern San Diego but it’s amazing what kind of results you can get with a Canon 10D. Traditionally you would use either slide film or a cooled, black and white CCD sensor.

This is a tutorial on replacing the bearings on the Losmandy G11 telescope mount. This may or may not improve the tracking ability. It’s kind of fun to do anyway. The Losmandy G11 mount is a great piece of hardware. However, the included bearings seem to fall short when compared to the rest of the mount. Unfortunately these bearings can play a large role in the tracking accuracy of the mount.

Takahashi FS102 Refractor This Apochromatic telescope provides very sharp images with no color fringed stars. When reduced to F/5.9 you get about 3 degrees of coverage in the sky. I prefer to take pictures of large, wide field objects and this is just about the right focal length for those objects. I also use the extremely well made Takahashi camera angle adjuster to make framing easy. I use a collection of camera bodies and lenses along with the telescope tube for pictures.