Advice on buying a CCD
Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 10:42 pm
Hiya folks,
Planning on buying a Celestron 6 SE sometime in the next month or two. For the moment, I'll buy a T-Ring and use my DSLR to do some initial photography, but I'd like to think about in future buying a dedicated CCD for deep sky work. I'm au fait enough with programs like PhotoShop to know how to reconstitute a 3 channel monochrome image, so I'd like to go down that route with the CCD. My criteria is that it needs to be:
- monochrome
- no IR filter
- compatible with Mac*
- possibly fan cooled (I've seen that many of them already are, so not really a criteria)
- not cost more than €500
I'm not sure if my criteria are unreasonable or not. I've seen some amazing cameras online, but I've no idea as to which I should go for and most are way out of my budget. I've done extensive research on Mac software, and one coming up trumps is "Nebulosity", but this limits my buying options to fairly high end (and high price) cameras. Does anyone know any other good Mac image capture software? Ideally, I'd love to find something around €200 I could work with for a start, but I realise this may not be viable (and also a waste of €200 I could eventually put towards something else) so I'm willing to save a bit longer for better. I also realise I'll need to consider a full filter kit, but they're easier to get a grip on than the camera's themselves. Should I just bite the bullet, save for a lot longer and buy something in the €1000 - €1500 bracket? I'm impatient at the best of times!!!
*If the fact I use Mac is a stumbling block, I may consider getting a cheap, decent Windows netbook, but this would seem a bit excessive considering the number of machines I have here that are all Apple.
So there! Any help or advice would be much appreciated!!!
Cheers,
Tady
Planning on buying a Celestron 6 SE sometime in the next month or two. For the moment, I'll buy a T-Ring and use my DSLR to do some initial photography, but I'd like to think about in future buying a dedicated CCD for deep sky work. I'm au fait enough with programs like PhotoShop to know how to reconstitute a 3 channel monochrome image, so I'd like to go down that route with the CCD. My criteria is that it needs to be:
- monochrome
- no IR filter
- compatible with Mac*
- possibly fan cooled (I've seen that many of them already are, so not really a criteria)
- not cost more than €500
I'm not sure if my criteria are unreasonable or not. I've seen some amazing cameras online, but I've no idea as to which I should go for and most are way out of my budget. I've done extensive research on Mac software, and one coming up trumps is "Nebulosity", but this limits my buying options to fairly high end (and high price) cameras. Does anyone know any other good Mac image capture software? Ideally, I'd love to find something around €200 I could work with for a start, but I realise this may not be viable (and also a waste of €200 I could eventually put towards something else) so I'm willing to save a bit longer for better. I also realise I'll need to consider a full filter kit, but they're easier to get a grip on than the camera's themselves. Should I just bite the bullet, save for a lot longer and buy something in the €1000 - €1500 bracket? I'm impatient at the best of times!!!
*If the fact I use Mac is a stumbling block, I may consider getting a cheap, decent Windows netbook, but this would seem a bit excessive considering the number of machines I have here that are all Apple.
So there! Any help or advice would be much appreciated!!!
Cheers,
Tady