Looking to buy a camera

[Johnnny]

That is strong enough to photograph the night sky. I want to be able to photograph the constellations on my own terms, and get GOOD pictures of the northern lights. The camera i have takes only fuzzy pictures of the northern lights if it can even pick them up... Can anyone recommend a certain type?

Thanks

 

[In Between Man]

That is strong ebough to photograph the night sky. I want to be able to photograph the constellations on my own terms, and get GOOD pictures of the northern lights. The camera i have takes only fuzzy pictures of the northern lights if it can even pick them up... Can anyone recommend a certain type?

Thanks

Buy either a Nikkon or a Canon. Those are the two best brands so don't look at anything else. Go Digitial SLR. The three main lenses you want to purchase with your SLR are the standard lens, telephoto zoom, and wide angle. Sounds like for your purposes, this is what you'll need. Have fun!

 

[Johnnny]

Thanks alley ill check out those brands

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Alley's got the brands right I think, and for my money Nikon is the best bet, though it depends what you're comfortable with. I bought a Nikon after handling several Nikon and Canon models, and the Nikon just felt better in my hands and the controls--at least the ones I'd use the most--seemed more conveniently placed to me. Night sky photography is pretty tricky though, regardless of your equipment. You'll certainly need a good tripod, and a remote cable or electronic shutter release will prevent camera shake when you press the shutter button. You'll need long exposures to photograph constellations, the camera doesn't respond in anything like the way your eye does, and I really doubt you'll get good images from ordinary camera lenses. I think you need a small telescope if you want to get serious about this. For starters I suggest you drop in to your favourite book shop and pick up Terence Dickinson's book NightWatch, it's a practical and very useful guide. Be sure to get the 4th edition, the 3rd is out of date in terms of celestial events worth watching. #juan is the local expert here, drop him a PM, I'm sure he'd be happy to advise you.

 

[TenPenny]

I have a Nikon D40x, it's a nice unit. Mail ordered it from the US a few years ago. Any digital SLR will let you get decent lenses that will let you get awesome sky shots.

 

[#juan]

Hi Dex, Johnny

The following images were taken with a fairly modest telescope and camera:

I'm sure you would reccognize these images as Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. The equipment to take images like these
would cost around $300.00 not including the camera. One of the telescope makers, "Cellestron", makes an inexpensive
telescope with a drive to cancel out the Earth's rotation. Celestron also makes an imaging camera that would take these
pictures with that telescope, for around a hundred dollars.

 

[Johnny Utah]

I have a Nikon and it's a great camera but I also have a Sony cybershot which is great especially if your packing light on a trip etc..

 

[#juan]

A couple more things:

Unless you have a telescope with a planetary mount and a motor drive, you
are going to have a hard time taking any kind of pictures of celestrial objects.

The Celestron Great Polaris mount which can be made to carry most
small to medium telescopes is about $600.00 but clones can be had
at a third of that. Both Celestron and Meade have relatively inexpensive
telescopes with motor drives that you can buy for less than $300.00.

 

[Johnnny]

Thanks for the help juan, dexter and everyone else. My coworker also mentioned a place in Toronto across from Yorkdale mall(Efstons) that sells the very same telescope brand you mentioned Juan. LOL i cant wait i want to be able to view all the messier objects myself and whatever else i can find.!!!!!

 

[#juan]

Here is a view of all the Messier objects without buying a telescope....Lol

List of Messier objects - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Johnnny]

Ive seen pliedes with my eye, and one very clear night i think i may have seen some of the objects in the leo constellation (thats a big MABYE). And the nebula in the orion constellation also. But thats all ive been able to locate. ... Im told i could see the andromeda galaxy but i still havent be able to see it

I want to have the power to see things in detail myself, know what i mean?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

IIm told i could see the andromeda galaxy but i still havent be able to see it

It's just about at the limit of naked eye visibility, you need a very dark night and very clear air. I've seen it only a couple of times without assistance, but with 10x50 binoculars I can find it anytime, even from my backyard with all the urban light pollution around. Cassiopeia and the Great Square of Pegasus are pretty distinctive and easy to find once you're a little more familiar with the night sky, the Andromeda galaxy lies between them, a little nearer to Pegasus than Cassiopeia. You should have a good planetarium type program too, there are plenty of freeware and shareware things out there. I use one called SkyGlobe, an old DOS app and still my favourite, I find it intuitively obvious to use (won't run on anything more recent than Windows XP though), and another called Stellarium. There's also a Windows version of SkyGlobe that I tried once, and really disliked, but you may find it satisfactory.

SkyGlobe
Stellarium

There's a bit of a trick to naked eye viewing too. Because of the way the rods and cones are arranged on the retina, you can see a very faint object better if you look slightly away from it.

 

[#juan]

I've found that once I located Andromeda, I could always find it again the next time.

A few months back I talked about getting a new telescope. I did finally get it but the weather for the last
few months has offered few opportunities to look at anything. The telescope I finally settled on is a Meade 5 inch
Maksutov cassegrain with the goto feature that is excellent. The only thing I've looked at so far is the moon but
the new scope seems to compare favorably to the 4 inch apochromatic refractor that is the bench mark I use to
judge other scopes.

The reason I brought up the new telescope is that with the goto system it can slew directly to an object
and put it right in the eyepiece. Assuming we get some clear weather sometime, I will post pictures as
soon as I take them.

 

[YukonJack]

When my daughter was young I gave her an entry-level Cannon.

Today she has a booming sideline as a successful photographer. Still with a Cannon, but this time it is state-of-the-art.

 

[Johnnny]

It's just about at the limit of naked eye visibility, you need a very dark night and very clear air. I've seen it only a couple of times without assistance,

so far here it looks like its going to be a clear night, im hoping to get a glimpse of it. Cant wait

I just saw a satellite i think. It was the size of a star, moving fast and blinking.... Mabye i saw a UFO lol

 

[Dexter Sinister]

You realize, of course, that the U in UFO is for "Unidentified," so if you don't know what it was, it's by definition a UFO.

But it was almost certainly a satellite, you can usually see several on any clear night, there's a lot of stuff up there. I hope you manage to spot M31. It doesn't look like much, just a vague fuzzy patch, but if anyone ever asks you how far you can see, you can say, "2.2 million light years."

 

[Johnnny]

But it was almost certainly a satellite, you can usually see several on any clear night, there's a lot of stuff up there. I hope you manage to spot M31. It doesn't look like much, just a vague fuzzy patch, but if anyone ever asks you how far you can see, you can say, "2.2 million light years."

im still wating till that area of the sky is more overhead. Theres still some light coming from the horizon

 

[Dexter Sinister]

So didja get to see it? Waiting may not have helped much, M31 would have been moving toward the horizon as the evening wore on, but you might have been helped by the increasing darkness in the west as the earth rotated away from the sun. Depends how far north you are too, "James Bay region" is a pretty large area. I had a look with the Stellarium program at how the sky would have looked from between 79 and 83 degrees longitude and 51 to 53 degrees latitude, which is approximately the James Bay area, to get an idea of what you'd be looking at. Didn't look very hopeful for you, M31's pretty low in the sky at the darkest times, but I hope you got lucky. In the astronomical observer sense of course. Although I can express good wishes for you in the more obvious sense too...

 

[Johnnny]

sorry the night clouded over pretty quickly after i posted the my last reply in my thread ... And yea that section was close to the horizon, ill have to wait till i go back to sudbury

 

[#juan]

Clear skys........I remember clear skys........We used to get this big yellow ball in the sky that gave
us heat and light.....:lol:

Seriously, Andromeda is one of the deep sky objects that really comes alive with an inexpensive
telescope and camera. A short time exposure on M31 brings out a lot of detail and colour. Keep
trying. You'll find it eventually. If you squint your eyes,Cassiopeia has a kind of screwed up W
and one of the legs of that W sort of points at Andromeda...Good luck..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertseandavies/3935087170/