What is the best camera for planetary imaging? So that is taking videos/photos of planets and the moon. What camera do you use and why? I would like some insight into what people use and why because there seem to be a lot of options available out there.
Tim,
A lot depends of what you wish to achieve. Whether DSO, Planetary or Lunar.
Lunar is fairly straight forward, sort of a what you see is what you get, unless trying to shoot mosaic, but that’s for another time lol. Depending on you back focus and scope, the planetary camera you choose, should suffice. I don’t shoot Lunar, or much planetary for that matter, so perhaps other can offer an opinion. Were I to try to shoot Lunar, I’d probably just rely on my DSLR for that.
For Planetary, on the right platform, I use an ASI662MC, One Shot Color (OSC) camera. Understand that when doing planetary, you’re not so much taking short or long exposure images, but rather shooting video. AVI format works well, as in a program such as SharpCap, the individual frames are stacked to form your image. The more and faster (frame rate) you can achieve, the better.
DSO require longer exposures. If not guiding, I’m not sure of the exact number, but I would start with 20-30 seconds per frame, checking to see if Star Trails are visible and pronounced.
If you are guiding, and it is performing well, your data collection goes up significantly. I use an ASI533 MC Pro OSC camera. I chose this one because it does not suffer from Amp Glow, which can occur with some camera sensors giving off light on one edge of your image. If you have Amp Glow, Dark Calibration frames can neutralize the effects.
If your guiding is going well, you could shoot anywhere from 1-5 minutes per frame. I have HyperStar and usually shoot 90-12- seconds per frame, but that’s because HS cut the speed of your scope from native F10 to F2.
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