Sky watching equipment

[mojo]

It would be great to save others grief and headaches with finding the right equipment that will do a good job in filming in low light situations, in particular skywatching. I can offer some advice and experience with a few items but I feel there might be others here that could help as well.

Here are a couple concerns.

The new Sony cams with the fixed IR pass filter are not effective for night filming, at least the models with interchangeable lenses. Sony continues to market the HXR NX 30V with night shot but be prepared to deal with a smaller fixed lens. It is high quality but not able to pull in the long shots better than Sony's older models. Gen 3 is not the end all either, perhaps blended tecnologies such as thermal and infrared might be nice. Gen 3 is great for close but without the gain adjustment illumination can wash out the detail of lit object.

There are still the old cams with night shot but their HI8 recording heads wear out and make noise. Sony's HDR-cx 700 is the other model I use but the lack of zoom is noticed in comparison to the older models.

I'm currently developing a thread about equipment and appreciate others helping making it a better thread. My friend offered good advice on some equipment such as a telephoto lens but the cost is high starting at over $10K for Nikon and Canon top end lenses, and used ones about half that. There has to be other alternatives out there. Any recommendations or suggestions would be appreciated & thanks...
edit:
The IR pass filter removal it seems might be one option and the when filming during daytime add an filter to compensate for the removal of the internal IR filter. The other serious consideration is a bigger and smaller F-stop such as 2.8 and not void the cam warranty. I'm not sure but perhaps f2.8 over the current 3.5 would provide enough light to keep the internal IR filter?

[Hughe]

What I found for best night sky shot is taking many shots over a period of time, then superimpose those images using digital manipulation software.

If you have brain power and willingness, you can build or modify equipment five to ten times less than the cost of commercial products. For example, I bought a cutting edge remote trigger here (http://www.doc-diy.net/photo/smatrig21/). $1,000 remoter trigger can't have half of functions of it.

There is a company that hacks Canon EOS digital camera for handling IR even UV spectrum.

http://www.lezot.com/servlet/the-45/Convert-digital-infrared-IR/Detail

Below site explains how to use digital camera for astrophotography in night time.
http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/dslr/EOS300Dastro.html

There are various IR filers that only allow IR light during day/night. You can find them Amazon.com or googling. Few companies build high quality IR filters that have specific IR spectrum range too.

The Open-Source Photographic Motion-Control Community (http://openmoco.org/) has a lot of information about how to build/modity high-end, sophisticated camera/video equipment.

I've had few shots that contain round metallic objects or anomaly in sky which exists beyond naked eyes. I can't see any of them but sometimes my chief Canon camera catch them. I usually spend five to ten minutes for sky photos inspection to find lucky shots.
If I would have time, I'd love to survey day and night sky for flying objects.

Equipment list:
dslr digital camera: at least two with 15MB to18MB pixel
Camera lens: telephoto, wide angle
Filters: IR, UV, other spectrum
Remote trigger: must have various time interval, exposure duration
tracking device: either stand alone or computer controlled (Telescope company sells it though.)
image manipulation software: should handle raw image data, high quality image manipulation functions.
data backup storage: removable hard disk, SDHC reader, water/shock proof case
reliable power source: rechargeable battery pack, small power generator, i.e solar panel or wind turbine

[mojo]

Great information Hughe and with your permission may I repost?

[kanishk]

Which type of telescope is required for observing moon surface? so that one can see things like bases or other type of structures if present there on surface.

[Hughe]

@kanishk
Have you seen this video yet?
O6ggirhnTm4


http://www.billbryson-astronomer.com/about-bill-bryson/


I do videos of the moon and space. I try to get out every evening. My telescope is a Celestron Nexstar 8SE and I use a especially designed Experimental Camera that allows me to video the moon live at 1080p. The detail is stunning in HD at 1080p…

[Unified Serenity]

GREAT THREAD!

I don't have anything great to capture what I see, and I would dearly love to have the equipment to do so, especially observing the moon and orbs. I have had two that stay in the east and west of my sky and they are not stars, and I seriously doubt they are satallites, though I can see they change colors from white to red frequently. I got tired of them and told them under the authority of Yeshua to leave the other night if they were not from God, and they left. I am out of town now, so I don't know if they have come back.

They just would sit there looking like very odd stars, but were much too low to be such. I have also seen two meteors very close up this past year which is a first for me. They were not shooting stars, but actually came down within probably 1/4 mile of my house. They were on the same trajectory about 2 weeks apart though.

I would really like to have something for nightvision function as many videos show there is much more up their which you can see even during the day by using that function. What video camera would do that best? Which has the best zoom capability to get those orbs? I would love to photograph or video them, but I am not about to spend thousands to do so.

[mojo]

Hi U.S.
Interesting sightings...and thank you for sharing. The meteor type you mentioned are neat and I recently filmed one in NV after seeing them and never being ready to catch them on camera and posted below for your review.
The Sony HI-8 cams with night shot mode work well. You can find them used on Ebay for around $200, avoid the models with super night shot and anything over 450x lens but even 450x might be a bit much IMHO. Yukon Night Ranger binoculars do a great job for around $350 and have a video output to film with...best wishes and please share more on your observations if you see anything exciting...:)

aBRaxWkcGRE

[Unified Serenity]

very kewl Mojo, thanks for the ideas. The meteors I saw were incredible. They flew past my deck at what appeared to be about 200 feet away and maybe 60 feet above tree level. They were large, appeared to be about a foot in diameter (hard to guestimate) and were red/yellow hot with sparks coming off of them. They did not land that far away, but too far away for me to track. I've never seen anything like them, and I forgot to mention, that I was on the phone at the time I saw the first one and it cut off my phone call or my phone was cut off right as it passed.