Deep Sky and Planetary are completely different beasts really Justin.Originally Posted by User211
The emphasis with Deep Sky is on accuracy of tracking and gathering lots of light. Optics with fast focal ratios (e.g f4 or f5) are ideal for this as they gather lots of light very quickly. The size of the optics just determines the field of view and the resolution.
My setup is great for wide field views of objects such as nebulas but doesn’t really have the resolution for smaller objects such as galaxies etc. To capture them well, I would need to use a bigger scope and therefore a heftier mount.
Planetary is a completely different emphasis. You generally need longer focal length to get the magnification/resolution. You are actually capturing many frames and selecting the ones which are best. You then stack the best together and pull out the details. Effectively, you capture a short film and weed out all the bad frames.
The bad frames are down to ‘bad seeing’, the effects of atmospheric distortion, clouds and the position of the object in the night sky. The lower the planet is, the more atmosphere it’s light has to pass through and therefore the greater the chance of distortion.
I haven’t done any planetary for years really. When I did, I only had an ED80 refractor to image with. It’s not bad, but not ideal. The preferred beast for planetary used to be a 9.25” Cassegrain variant.
I used to capture planetary with my ED80 on a basic alt-azimuth mount on a photographic tripod and using a modified £30 webcam [emoji4]
Here’s a couple of examples of what you can get with the old-school stuff, the new kit is much better I imagine.
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