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Introduction

This all started when I decided I wanted to take pictures of galaxies and nebulas using the telescope my wife bought.  She picked a perfect gift back in 2001, the Meade ETX-60AT package sold at the Discovery Store at the mall.  It was a hit with me.  Back in high school, I had a refractor that was 10X , approximately a 40mm lens and about 2 foot long with a small 1' tripod.  I hooked my 35mm SLR to it and took pictures - the best were of a total solar eclipse down near Raleigh, NC.

I hadn't used my new telescope that much, as I wasn't sure what to look at.  I had bought a starmap book, and found some other astronomy books from when I was a kid.  But they were not helping me to find the interesting objects - galaxies and nebula and clusters - what everyone thinks they will see through a telescope.  In May of 2004, my wife and I visited the Mauna Kea Observatories on the big island of Hawaii.  That experience was fantastic and renewed my interest in my current telescope, as I now could find the Great Orion Nebula (thanks to the U of H students that run the visitors center) and I could see the fuzzy gaseous nebula with my telescope.  That trip also peaked my wife's interest in astronomy, as she had not been bitten by the bug previously.

I finally decided to see how feasible it was to take pictures of galaxies and nebulas with the telescope I had, or if I needed really expensive equipment.  This web site shares my experiences.

Researching Photographic Equipment for my Telescope

I looked at hooking a digital camera up to my telescope and quickly learned that I would have to buy a camera that was expensive so that it had the adapters necessary to connect to a T-Adapter on the telescope.  When I saw that Meade had the LPI for $99, ready to do exactly the same function, with seemingly similar results, I decided to look closer as $99 seemed way to inexpensive.  There was no way a $99 imager could do the job.

I started looking at the DSI series of products and decided I should start out with one of the low end units.  Here's where I think I should have made a different decision.  I decided to buy the DSI I Color version.  It was actually the cheapest DSI.  If I were doing it again, I would recommend paying $100 more to get the DSI II mono, as it does not contain the CYMG filters and also has 4 times the pixels.  But, I thought that seeing some of the nebulas, etc., in color would be kool (visions of Hubble Telescope Pictures).  That bubble was burst upon initial usage and when I realized how color was actually produced - using filters.  Filters are just that, they remove some of the light.  This means you get less light, which is a limited commodity when viewing deep sky objects.  On the other side, some objects do have color and are much more exciting when viewed in color.

I also want to recommend that you do not purchase the LPI, unless you have a specific purpose that it can perform.  It is 640 by 480 - 8 bits.  The biggest problem is that it is not sensitive enough for deep sky imaging usage. 

Are you considering imaging?

The biggest obstacle to successful imaging is not money, the power of your telescope, how great a CCD unit you purchased, but rather time and persistence.  A complete system can be purchased from Meade for $600 - ETX-80BB and DSI I Color (Windows laptop/computer not included).  This web site goes thru the trials and tribulations of my experiences.  I walked into this with little knowledge - I didn't even know where to look for galaxies and nebulas, other than the Great Orion Nebula.  I didn't know the names or numbers, nor what the Messier Series was.  Much of that research is not documented.

Side note:  I was familiar with the Great Orion Nebula because I visited Mauna Kea Observatories back in 2004 and played with the telescopes at the visitors center - a 12' Meade really brought the Great Orion Nebula into view.  That trip probably was what got my interest back into night viewing.

I do suggest the internet as a great place to start.  www.skymaps.com has a monthly FREE star map with a listing of what to observe.  It is great, as the objects are listed by visual observer, with binoculars, or with a telescope.  Many of the great Hubble Telescope photos can not be seen without fantastic equipment and only from a good observation point - not where I live.  The information in SkyMaps has helped me to identify objects that my 60mm telescope can see.  If you want more info on a particular object, use any of the search engines, tons of info and images are published.

The Acquisition Process  (this normally wouldn't be documented, but ...)

I ordered the DSI I Color from Oceanside Photo and Telescope, as they had free shipping, on my birthday in early March of 2007.  Unfortunately, the CD with the software and drivers was warped when it arrived.  I called Meade and a friendly guy said he had the CD in his hand and addressed an envelope for that day's mail.  The Instructional DVD arrived about a week later.  Not bad if you have no idea what you are doing, it really gave me a clue of what to expect.  Actually, the expectations I got from that video are significantly below what I attained within the first couple weeks of experimenting.

I then emailed Oceanside and Meade and Mike Weaver (big thanks to Mike).  The following day I called both companies.  A nice girl at Meade said she would send the CD right out.  Vmail at OPT.  About a week later, the old version CD that doesn't work on XP SP2 arrived.  I called again and was pretty, well let's just say upset.  Another nice girl apologized asked me to hold.  She claimed to go to the software department and get the latest CD hot off the press.  Well, two CDs arrived on the same day, one appeared to be from email/form on the Meade website and the other from the nice girl.  The one from the nice girl appeared to be the correct software, the other was another copy of the old version - without Drizzle too. 

During this four week period of owning and holding a DSI in my hot hands and not being able to fire it up gave me plenty of time to research how to use the DSI.  I found Mike Weaver's ETX site to be an excellent source.  I especially needed the information Mike posted from an email from Niall Saunders, as it help me understand where to start and what some of the important issues are.  I promised Mike that I would document my findings and procedures  and this web site was created for that purpose, as well as a place for me to post my not so bad deep sky images.

Projects

There are multiple Project Buttons to the left that provide access to each Process' Project Page.  On that page each Project is listed that is discussed on this web site (many projects that didn't provide a reasonable result or otherwise did not contribute to the final processes were not included.  Some kool shots are included even if they really didn't contribute - just call me a show off).  A project is a set of images (one or more observations) that are post processed as a group to produce one or more resultant presentation images.  The projects are listed in chronological order and reading them in order will provide a "play by play" of how I came up with the processes documented on this site.

Reference

The Reference Button to the left goes to a section that contains both the equipment descriptions and has a section describing each process that provided results and improvements in the process.  Each process is based on some sort of new method of handling a particular problem.  I smell science fair project :)

Factoids

The Factoids Button to the left goes to a section dedicated to other interesting information.  Some is related, some is just interestingly weird.

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PS - If you find anything on this page that is copyrighted material and we did not give an appropriate copyright notice for the owner, first realize that it is an oversight, as we are not trying to claim credit but for only a few of the pictures on this site.  Then we ask you to please let us know about the item in question. And finally, also realize that this is a private and non-commercial and hopefully educational site.  So buzz off.

Copyright © 2007, Gary Gorsline.  All Rights Reserved