Ad Astra Observatory

How things change, seemingly overnight.

When the Nikon D70 died at the end of May, I was devastated to lose my primary imaging camera. Luckily, I had a backup ready to jump in to fill the void.

And, like it always seems to go in the NFL, the backup turns out to be a nice performer, and the old workhorse is coming back to sit on the bench.

After fighting against the perception that the Nikon is an inferior astrocamera for 4 years, I dropped the Canon into place and found that all of a sudden my life got easier.

The shutter-control hardware is so easy to use that I created a Canon shutter control circuit on a Saturday morning (including code). It’s both less fiddly and easier to implement than the Nikon’s shutter control.

Although I am enjoying the T-threaded Ha filter (which would work for either Canon or Nikon), and it’s been a great introduction to narrowband imaging, there’s a clip-in version (for Canon only, of course) that’s going to be the final solution, because it doesn’t add length to the imaging train (and thus doesn’t throw off the corrector/flattener spacing).

And, most damning, the images that come out of the Canon are noticeably less noisy than the ones that came out of the Nikon. There is something to this “Canon RAW = RAW, Nikon RAW = Medium Rare” argument.

The Canon is not a panacaea — like the Nikon, there is still amp glow to be removed with darkframes (the Canon users don’t often mention this). I find the on-camera controls slightly more awkward on the Canon than the Nikon (I still haven’t figured out how to zoom on the LCD, for instance). Because I don’t have a Stiletto module for the Canon, I have to focus the camera by the tried-and-true “shoot a photo, move the focuser, shoot a photo, repeat” method, which is slow. And it’s still a DSLR, so it’s one-shot-color (a benefit or drawback depending on the day and target), it’s uncooled (see “dark frames” above), it has a deeply-set CCD that eats up space in the imaging train, and of course, MaxIM DL loves to crash while trying to connect/reconnect.

But at the end of the day, the quality of my images has increased, and the ease with which I capture them has increased, and the Canon is now the camera that sits on the focuser, and the Nikon sits in the camera bag, waiting to be called up for star trails, widefield, or other “backup” work.