In my quest to get some half decent astrophotography images, I came across something I didn’t know existed. It is from a company called ZWO and is called a Planetary Camera. The company makes a range of these, and the one I was advised to try was the AUD$279 Model 662.
These cameras contain a small sensor made by Sony and are designed only to take astral images. And when I say a “small” sensor, I do mean small. The sensor in the 662 I was sent measure 4.8mm x 3.55mm with a resolution of 2.7 MP.
Compare that to say, the Canon EOSR8 I was playing with that has a sensor of 24.2MP measuring 36mm x 24mm!
To use this planetary camera, instead of placing a standard camera intro the viewfinder tube on the telescope, the camera is inserted with a USB-C cable connecting it to a computer.
The resultant image the camera picks up is displayed in specialist capture software, with settings available to change exposure, gain and so on.
ZWO has its own package for this that contains modules to capture planetary images of deep sky images, as well as for “stacking” captured images.
Once you are happy with the framing of the moon, Jupiter, Mars or whatever, you then hit the record button in the software and a video is shot for a predetermined time. You can either set this or let the computer determine the time. Once the capture is complete, the stacking software is then used to extract individual frames from the video and “stack” them together to form a composite image.
In theory, it all sounds very simple, but as I am finding, the reality is not quite that easy! There is a lot of trial and error in getting the right image. Experts tell me the best way to learn is to use the Moon to start with, get that perfected and then move onto Mars and Jupiter.
But even before trying that, just to get an image you can look at proudly and say you did it, to get a sense of achievement, someone suggested using the free Stellarium software to find a patch of night sky with LOTS of stars and shoot that.
At the moment, the Moon rise and set times and phases are not quite suitable – I’ll have to wait a few weeks for that so I am going to try this second option.
There are also familiarity issues with the software, as with this camera, there is no auto white balance due to the sensor size, so if you try and get everything aligned with the telescope and spotter scope to make lining up planets in the telescope easier, it does need a bit of playing around as in daylight, all the colours seem “wrong” – for example the leaves on a tree become bright red!
Additionally, with a small sensor, that alignment has to be spot on otherwise you will have a hell of a job getting something in the centre of the frame.
So as always, there is a learning curve. I’ll keep you posted. But one thing is for sure, looking at the results my peers are getting will make it all worthwhile when I have it right!
