Use a star near your target to collimate your scope just before you shoot to ensure your best collimation. Newtonian reflectors, Schmidt-Cassegrains, and other mirror-based telescopes need to be precisely collimated to perform at their best. This down-samples every frame, reducing the resolution of the image. In 1080p high-definition video mode, the camera records an image that is only 1,920 pixels wide by 1,080 pixels high.
BACKYARDEOS & BACKYARD NIKON 720P
Although you can use normal high-definition 1080p or 720p video modes for lunar and solar imaging with great results, you generally don’t want to use this mode for planetary work because it resamples the image recorded by the camera’s detector, and you will lose fine detail.įor example, the sensor in the Canon EOS Rebel T3i (also called the 600D) has an array of 5,184 by 3,456 pixels. Cameras with Live View offer the easiest route, using the zoom preview mode to get to a 1:1 crop of the central portion of the camera’s detector. The trick to capturing the highest-resolution, planetary imaging details with a DSLR is to use a mode that allows you to record the image off the camera’s sensor at its native pixel resolution. This is where two video modes on your DSLR camera, Live View and high-definition video, come into play.
To capture the best planetary images these days, the preferred technique is known as “lucky imaging.” This method records thousands of frames in a high-speed video stream, which you can later sort for the best frames to stack into a final high-resolution image. But few users realize that the video modes available on DSLR cameras are great for recording high-resolution planetary images. And, of course, DSLRs can be used to snap daytime photos of any kind. Using the latest models, you can shoot long-exposure deep-sky images, create time-lapse movies from a set of still images, or record high-definition video with a quality that exceeds footage recorded by some dedicated video cameras. Digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) today are amazingly versatile.