My 18 yo daughter and I have been dying to do astrophotography, and we ended up buying an STF-8300C on special from Opt. The problem is we are clueless on how to use it properly. Is there a tutorial that goes through all the settings we would need to have set, and all the steps we would need to take in order to take a picture? Here's what we have done so far: The camera is mounted on an astro-tech AT80LE with a moonlite focuser and a televue compression ring extension tube. We've used this before with a Canon DSLR 600D. On the tube rings is a vixen dovetail and it has a ZWO guide scope mounted with an AS120mm-S autoguider. The telescope is mounted on an Ioptron Ieq45 pro. We have everything connected to a USB hub and that is connected to a laptop. On the laptop we have PhD2 and CCDops loaded. We think we focused. We did a shot of M13 but what we saw on the display in CCDOPS looked horrible compared to our 600D canon. There was a complete lack of fine detail. And we have no idea how to stack the images/process etc. We fumbled with the software and last night at 2:30am gave up. We need a tutorial that steps us through this, including the settings to use etc. Is there any such thing, or book, or? That uses the SBIG camera and software?
There is a lot to consider, but here are some links to a few tutorials on imaging. Unfortunately, there is are no tutorials available for CCDOps that I am aware of, so these are using MaxIm DL mostly. http://starizona.com/acb/downloads/videos.aspx http://www.cyanogen.com/maxim_tut.php
Hi Michael, There are some good youtube videos on how to stack images and calibrate. CCDops is a very basic program and not meant to be full featured. If you want to call I can give you some pointers and some suggestions. I also give on-screen lessons after hours as well.
