I've owned a few cameras in my days. More than some, less than many. Here are my adventures. Once again, I will throw the disclaimer out there that I am only speaking from my experiences. There are a lot of people out there who know a LOT more about this stuff than I do. Take this for what it's worth, and before making a decision, consult with the masses of experts out there on the Internet, and local astro groups.

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Film Cameras SLR, or Single Lens Reflex are the type of cameras you need for astrophotography. I have had SLR cameras for years, and have never had much luck with them. I live in an area where the seeing isn't very good. It's not that there's a ton of light pollution, it's just that the transparency is never really clear. This creates a problem with film cameras. The way film cameras work is, you setup the shot, focus, and then hit a button that opens the shutter on the camera. The shutter remains open for the duration of the exposure. Then when the picture is done, you hit the button again, and the shutter closes. To make a long story short, film astrophotography, to be any good, requires very long exposures. Some as long as an hour or more. There is SOOOO much that can go wrong in an hour. Bump the scope while you're taking the shot, and you can kiss that photo goodbye. Less than perfect guiding can cause the photo to go bad. Fortunately, film has a characteristic called reciprocity. Reciprocity has to do with the speed that the light is absorbed onto the film. High reciprocity means errors show up very quickly. Low reciprocity means that the film is a little more forgiving. You can actually have some guiding errors, and it will still look ok over the stretch of a long exposure. I'm not gonna go into film speeds and types, but I think generally, the slower speed films (ASA 400) have a better reciprocity, where the faster films (1600, 3200) are less forgiving. The faster films collect light faster, so it's very tempting to use a faster film, and there are processes like hypersensitising the film (pressurizing and gassing the film to make it more sensitive), and push processing and all kinds of stuff to get more out of a shorter amount of time. It's a science, really. But here's the painful part, and probably the biggest factor about why I don't use film anymore... The wait, and the cost. First, you have to buy the film, at maybe $4-6 for a roll of film. Then you take your photos with no knowledge of how things are going for the night. Then the next day, you take the film somewhere, where your film is in the hands of the guy doing the processing. Then you have to pay again for the processing, so there's another $12-15 for each roll of film, and typically with astrophotography, you're using maybe 4-6 of the pictures in the roll, unless you're doing moon or planet photography. So there's a lot of waste. BUT then, you open up the folder and look at your photos only to find that half of them didn't turn out for this reason or that- bad guiding, frost/dew, the film was bad, under-exposed, over-exposed, a plane flew through the shot... There are a million ways a shot can get screwed up. So now for each one that didn't get, there's 15-60+ minutes lost. I don't mean to sound bitter, but as I said, I never had good luck with film. Maybe it's because I don't live on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, with perfect skies every night. Or maybe it's cuz I just don't know what I'm doing. Whatever the reason, film is not for me. Oh, and another thing about film SLR cameras- it's difficult to come across a setup that really works for you. You can read more about my trials and tribulations in the Ya Live, Ya Learn article, but to sum it up quickly, I read that I needed an SLR camera. I bought two Yashica cameras off ebay for a good price ($30 for both, or something like that). They didn't have a removeable prism or focus screen, and were very difficult to focus for this reason. They worked well for star trails or piggyback where you set the focus on the lens for infinity, but not much else. Then I bought a Miranda camera because it had a removeable prism and replaceable focus screen, but I couldn't find any for it. Junk. Then I finally bought a Nikon F2. It's a great camera, but still very difficult to focus. I made an 8x lupe magnifier, and bought a Beattie Intenscreen focus screen. Those things made it a lot better. So my focus was great, but then my guiding was really bad, because I couldn't get the 201XT working, then I got an ST-4, and I couldn't get that working... The story goes on and on and on... I bought a Nikon F for a really good price as a backup for the F2. I used those two cameras for awhile, then I kinda stopped taking pictures for awhile- maybe a year or two. The photos above are (left to right): 1) Nikon F2 behind a Lumicon Giant Easyguider on the back of my 10" LX-200. 2) Close-up of the Lupe installed as a magnifier. 3) Close-up of the Beattie Intenscreen Plus 4) Nikon F2 piggyback on my old LX-50 with a 201XT autoguider through prime focus 5) Classic manual guiding setup with the F2 on the end, with a Meade Off-axis guider, a Celestron f/6.3 focal reducer and a Celestron wide-band deep sky filter.   Peak 8x Lupe converted into a magnified viewfinder. Focusing on a camera through a telescope is a VERY difficult thing to do. Fortunately, there are some ways of getting around this. Some day I plan to write up documentation on how to build one of these. It just takes a little patience, a dremmel tool, and the lupe. This is the rectangle model, which is very close in size and shape to the prism channel. With this configuration, the view of a deep space object is a little dimmer than if I were using a cheap MA25mm eyepiece. The Beattie Intenscreen Plus focus screen with etched gridlines. This isn't exactly a cheap shortcut, but it sure makes life easier when focusing an SLR film camera. I got this model over the clear model for two reasons- 1) the etched lines on the screen aid in making sure the lupe is focused properly, and 2) it aids in centering my target object in the viewfinder. Modified Hartmann Mask. This mask is used to creat multiple images of a star or bright object in your eyepiece. When you see more than one image, it's out of focus. When they're intersected, it's in focus. Take a piece of cardboard or manilla folder, and make a solid circle a little bigger than the end of your optical tube assembly. I just traced the cover. Then, make two circles opposite each other, that are about 1/3 the width of the optical end. Keep in mind, you have to avoid the center mirror obstruction. Then, in those circles, draw small slits across the diameter of the two circles, but make 90 degrees akew each other. With an x-acto knife, cut the slits out. The mask should look like the picture to the right. Tape this mask over the outside of your OTA, and point the scope at a bright star. If the scope is out of focus, you will see two slits, one horizontal and one vertical. As they come into focus, they will make a cross like the image to the right. When you see the cross, it's in dead focus. This type of mask is called a modified Hartmann mask because the original hartmann masks were just dots. A good example of this type of focus mask is the Kendrick Kwik Focus mask. You can see mine here. The three-dot version is pretty acurate, but the ones with only two dots are so-so. With the slit modification, you can get very precise focus because you know exactly when the lines intersect in the middle. You can use this method directly through the viewfinder of the camera, but by using the image preview with magnification as described above, you'll get a great focus. True CCD Cameras I'm afraid I have no experience in this area, so I will leave a placeholder here in case I do someday. Digital SLR Cameras July 2006 I purchased a Nikon D50 Digital SLR camera. WHAT A DIFFERENCE!!! I have just started dabbling with the technology, but already one of my first photos has far surpassed what I've ever shot using film. Don't get me wrong- film has its place, but I doubt I will ever be going back. The two styles are light night and day. For one thing, I live in a good area, however I still have some light pollution. Allentown is about 12 miles south of me, so I get a nice glow to my south. I can barely make out the Milky Way on a good, clear night. Anyway, in order to shoot a good film photo, you have to take a really long exposure. Sometimes over an hour. The other downfall is (and believe me, I've done this more times than I care to divulge), I've shot a whole roll of film only to find I messed something up- I had really bad focus, poor guiding, or the lens fogged up half-way through the shot (yea, I even have the Kendrick heaters). You don't know anything until the next day when you get the photos processed and find that you spent six hours shooting in the freezing cold, and $5 for the film, and another $12 to have it processed and find that you have a nice folder filled with blurry or otherwise messed up pictures. With digital photography, on the other hand, you can focus, take a short exposure, look at it (even zoom in on the display, or show the pic on your laptop screen), then refocus, shoot, repeat. You will also know immediately when something is going wrong, as you get to review the shot as soon as it's been taken. And the best part of all is that your shots are much shorter. What you do in a single on-hour exposure on film can be done with ten 10-minute shots, or even twenty 5-minute shots. If one or two of them gets messed up by poor guiding or fog, clouds, airplanes, whatever, you can toss that one and still have another 9 or so. Then you digitally stack them to add the light collected by the seperate images, and voila, you have a nicely shot picture. My biggest problem has always been with two things- focus and guiding. As I said above- focus is much easier now. Regarding guiding- I have owned a Meade 201-XT and an SBIG ST-4 autoguider. I've also tried webcam guiding and I have had little to no success. To be able to guide an hour-long exposure through xhair reticles is a real pain. To do it with a few short shots for whatever reason seems much easier to handle. I guess it's because you get a break, or maybe it's the satisfaction knowing the shots will get better. Whatever. Digital Camera Preview Screen with Zoom. I'm going to be writing an article on focusing, since I've spent a lot of time and effort learning how to do it well (and I'm still learning, believe me). But until then, here's another great focusing technique with a Digital SLR camera. Get the subject to where you believe it's at a good focus through the scope. Take an exposure that's about 30 seconds long. Then pull the image up in preview mode, and do a digital zoom to the highest magnification. This works great, and when used with the modified hartmann mask above, you'll get a great focus every time. The downfalls to this technique are that you are touching the camera while you're doing all of this, and the screen is typically very bright, so it may affect your night vision. Nikon F2 body as a focuser for DSLR camera. Since I got the D50 DSLR camera, I haven't used my F or F2 once. It's sad, really because I bought that camera when it was ~15-20 years old, and it cost me $260 for the body alone. Now that everything's going digital, you can get these for less than $50. So it's a shame to get rid of it, and it just sits in the camera bag. As I said before, focusing a camera through a telescope is a difficult thing to do. This setup was awesome. And you know what? This setup is parfocal to my D50. So, I can snap the F2 with the intenscreen and 8x Lupe onto the OTA, focus, then put the DSLR back on, and it's a really sharp focus. Works great! Infrared Remote for DSLR Camera. even though this isn't exactly to do with focusing, it can certainly affect how your images turn out. In the past with film cameras, I had a bulb cable attached to the camera body. When you want to snap a photo, push the end of the cable, and it locks with the mirror up. Click the end, and it releases and your photo is done. Problem number one with this arrangement is you're touching something directly attached to the camera. Even with a delicate hand, you're still moving the camera. The Nikon D50, and I'm assuming many other DSLR cameras, have an option for a wireless remote. This is fantastic. You can set the camera on a remote timer, so you hit the button, it will open the shutter, wait 5 seconds, then start the exposure. This is great, because even the movement from the shutter is dampened in 5 seconds. Hit the remote a second time, and it closes the shutter. This remote cost me about $10 on ebay. It's not the real Nikon remote, but works just as well. Web Cams December 2006: Some amazing developments in astrophotography over the past few years. I'm just staring to catch up. To this point, most of my photos of planets and the moon are film photographs. As you can imagine, the problem with that is, unless you have an enormous telescope on the top of a mountain, you're probably not going to get a really great shot of a planet. It's just not that easy. With Mars, you're lucky if you see a little shading on a red dot. Jupiter, you'll get some weather, but not much, and Saturn- I've seen some decent results, but not by me. Enter the DSLR camera. Yep, great stuff. High resolution, and you can digitally stack the photos to get a better image from averaging the photos. But unless you have software that will keep opening and closing the shutter over and over and over, hundreds of times, it's not gonna work well for you. Not to mention, you're gonna ruin the shutter over time, and your battery life is limited. Enter the webcam. At their inception, they were really poor quality. 320x200 resolution, choppy, poor contrast and color, etc. Not that great. Well, over time, the quality has been getting better. Now, the way a webcam works, if you record live video, is it will just keep on taking frame after frame after frame, and dump them to an .AVI file. You can take that .AVI file and share it with your friends, and they didn't have to freeze their butts off to see the same thing you did through your eyepiece, but it doesn't stop there. There is software available that will take those .AVI files and stack and average the individual frames on top of each other. Now, if you take a dozen shots of something and average them together, you're gonna get a pretty decent photo. Now, consider this- a few minutes of video will have several hundred, maybe even thousands of frames. Stack those together, and you can get something spectacular. I have seen some absolutely amazing images of the planets and the moon through a webcam and an 8" telescope. I just purchased a Philips ToUcam Pro II 840k (late December 2006). I just started doing some photography, so I really don't have much to share, but I will say this- the first time out with this webcam, and I completely blew away anything I ever took on film or DSLR. It's tempting to think that maybe you can use this same technology for deep space photography, but it doesn't work taht way. With DSLR and film, the exposure data/light adds to an image. Webcams just keep taking very short exposures. For deep space, you need at least a few minutes per frame to get something useful. There are some people who have modified their webcams to do deep space, but in my opinion, I don't think it will ever get to the point where it threatens DSLR or film. I've been wrong before tho, so who knows. A web cam for astrophotography? You're probably thinking it's cheezy using this cheap little video camera for astrophotography, but I'll tell you, I don't think I've ever seen images from film or DSLR from an amateur home observatory that rivals some of the photos I've seen made by a webcam. The way it works is, the webcam takes a constant video stream of maybe 10-20 frames per second. You take that movie file, import it into some software, and the software digitally stacks and averages the images to make a super-crisp image. You can see some of the photos I've taken in the astrophotography section. I bought the Philips ToUcam Pro II 840k. It's one of the more expensive ones (a whopping $80), but is a higher quality than your typical webcam, and is one of the most popular in use right now. I've also heard that people are using webcams as autoguiders with software like Guide Dog. I have an ST-4, so I haven't tried this yet. Autoguiders I have never tried this, but I just wanted to mention that some people try and use their autoguiders as astro cameras. And why not, they're CCD cameras. They're just really low resolution CCD cameras. Never had the desire to try it, but hey, whatever gets you excited, I guess. SBIG ST-4. Some people have used these to do astrophotography. Software and Miscellaneous I just wanted to mention that once you get the photos into the camera or onto your computer (DSLR and webcam), that's only half the journey. Then you have digital processing to do. That's where you stack your images, average them, process them this way and that, clean them up, etc... There's lots to say about Photoshop, Images Plus, Iris, Maxim-DL, MaxDSLR, and a slew of other packages, but I couldn't do it justice. This is one of those places where you're just better off buying a good book. I suggest A Guide to Astrophotography with Digital SLR Cameras by Jerry Lodriguss. This is the most comprehensive source of digital astrophotography, and includes a wealth of information on digital processing using several software packages. There are a ton of video demos on the disc as well. I believe Michael Covington is also in the process of writing a similar book.