From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: October 1, 2005 11:02:50 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Planning on a better camera

Hi Duane -

Sorry - meant to respond to your post yesterday.

For planetary imaging, the smaller chip is best. The planets will fit on the small chip nicely even at f50. Beyond this is probably useless oversampling. The bigger chip would be nice for lunar imaging at high resolution. But here you have a lot of light so the faster download rate of the smaller chip will be helpful too as you battle the seeing. And you can always mosaic larger images. I can't get sharpness over the entire 640x480 chip in 6/10 seeing. 

All things considered, I would recommend the DMK21AF04 mono camera - I think it is a good marriage of cost and quality. (The DFK is a color camera, I think).

I bought a very nice manual filter wheel from a maker in Italy for about 300.00. I have also heard good things about the ATIK manual wheel - I think it is 100. less expensive. There is a lot of versatility to the mono cameras - a little more work too, but if you get hooked, I think you will find it a good trade off.

my .02 only, of course.

Alan

On Sep 29, 2005, at 5:47 PM, Duane wrote:

Hi all,

I am going to delve into planetary imaging because the views I was getting of Mars are 

calling me like a sweet mesmerizing spell...     "Duane, Image me"

I have the board camera that Milton suggested on the way, but I will eventually want 

something better (like in a few months when Saturn starts casting spells on me).

One camera I am considering is the DFK-31AF03-ML from The Imaging Source.

It's a B&W (leading to another question, what is recommended for filters/holder)

1024x768

15fps  (up to 30 seconds)

8bit

for $695

There is a trade off that I'm not sure which is more important for planetary imaging.

Higher res or faster frames?

30fps and 640x480   OR   15fps and 1024x768

That is my main question.

Thanks much for the help,

Duane Deal

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