Message posted by lone wolf on February 05, 2005 at 11:33:02 PST:

Ron Wodaski wrote the book (literally) on astrophotography. His chapter on focusing is free to download, though maybe only 10% of it is relevant to photographing the base from Tikaboo.

Note that Ron is a CCD user (basically digital versus film). You can find examples of photographing the base using a CCD camera on the desertsecrets website. There are a few problems with that technique. First, if you use a camcorder to store the images, it is really hard to focus the telescope looking through the camcorder viewfinder. Second, if you use a notebook to store the iamges, then it is difficult to see the notebook screen in the daylight. I have one of those bulky 5 lb notebooks that would be hard to carry up Tikaboo, though not impossible.

Frame capturing on the notebook can be done in a few ways. I have this "Fry's" blow-out $10 Intel webcan that accepts composite video and can frame capture. You can also buy off the shelf frame capture hardware for a bit over $100. If you google around, you will find that some companies modify webcams to fit the 1.25 inch eyepiece fitting on the telescope. Lastly, you can get adapters that can connect your camcorder to the telescope Assuming you already own a camcorder, this is cheaper than buying a manual focus camera, magnifier, etc., but you do have the focusing problem.

In CCD photography, you can take multiple shots of the same frame and pick the best shots. There is software to stack the image and supposedly get a sharper image. The stacking software is free
http://registax.astronomy.net/
I haven't used registax, but I have stacked night vision frame captured images using
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/
which is also free. Night vision improves greatly when stacked and averaged

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