CCD Imaging

I spend a great deal of my telescope time doing CCD imaging and not as much doing actual visual work.  A lot of times I'll do visual observing while the scope is cooling down to do some imaging with or I'll do some visual observation after I'm done imaging, assuming I'm not frozen by then.   

View images by type from the selections below or find out more about my imaging system or about image processing in the links below. 

• Deep Sky Objects
• Lunar Imaging
• Planetary Imaging
• Venus Images
• Mars Images
• Jupiter Images
• Saturn Images
• Comet Hale-Bopp Images
• My CCD Setup
• Planetary Image Processing
• CCD Imaging Tools
• CCD Imaging Links

Hardware

I'm using a Celestron PixCel 255 camera for imaging. I thought long and hard about which camera to buy and ended up picking the PixCel for several reasons:

• It has small pixcels, 10 microns in size so resolution is good
• It has a reasonable field of view with the C5+, especially with an f/6.3 reducer
• SBIG has a very good reputation in the CCD imaging field
• It is getting great support from Celestron - they are building a new scope around it and have talked people like Software Bisque into adapting software packages for it
• It has Track & Accumulate for pretty good images w/o long manual guiding

I am using an IFocus ocular from Software Bisque to help with focusing the system along with a Diffraction Focuser.   I just built a very simple Diffraction Focusing Tool that took all of 2 minutes to make and has caused my images to be much better.   See the article on Diffraction Focuser for CCDs by Warren Offutt on the Sky & Telescope page for details.  I made mine out of two bamboo skewers held parallel by duct tape and with velco on the end to quickly attach to my dew-cap.   I use the IFocus occular to get focus in the general range then stick on the diffraction focuser, put CCDSoft in focus mode and adjust finely until I get a single spike and good focus. 

Software

I'm using a combination of packages right now for grabbing and image processing though I'm fully doing everything on Windows finally.   I'm using the following packages:

• CCDSoft by Software Bisque - This is a pretty simple package but does a good job of many tasks.  I like its capture mode a lot and I like the way its Unsharp Mask function looks. 
• MaximDL by Cyanogen - This one is still pretty new for me.  I like some of the features a lot though - the ability to combine files easily, the mosaic function, and the Maximum Entropy functions. 
• AstroStack by R.J. Stekelenburg - I just learned of this one and it does a great job of automatically stacking images, unsharp masking, and deconvolution.  You need images in .bmp or .avi format which makes it a bit tougher to use but the results are worth it - see Jupiter image from 11/28/00 above. 

Here's a link to a Microsoft Excel 6.0/95 spreadsheet that is my CCD Field of View Worksheet. If you are using IE 3.X then you may end up with this embedded in your window, to actually download it right-click on the hot-link and use the "Save Target As..." item in the pop-up menu.

• Antonio Cidadao's Lunar and Planetary Observing and Imaging Page - one of the best resources I've found on the net.
• High Resolution CCD Imaging - another good resource with lots of tips.
• Sky and Telescope CCD Imaging  - good basics
• CCD Camera Cookbook Page - How to build your own CCD Camera from Richard Berry
• Amateur Astronomy - Good page with CCD Images
• Santa Barbara Instruments Group - A good place to download CCD software and images to play with, makers of many CCD cameras
• PixCel 255 Images - This is a German site, can't read it but the images are really good
• Software Bisque - Makers of The Sky, CCD Soft and distributors of Real Sky. These are great applications that work together very well, I use all three regularly.
• Cyanogen - Makers of MaximDL