South West Herts
Astronomical Society

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CCD Imaging Since 1996

After over 20 years of taking astrophoto’s with the ever increasing light & general pollution in the area of West London were I live which is next to a main trunk road about 10 miles from Heathrow. In the late 1980’s I decided to concentrate only on Lunar & Planetary photography as deep sky photography had by then become totally impossible.

Then back in 1994 when I & a couple of colleagues went on a weekend course on CCD imaging at Keele university, we had the opportunity to witness the results of using a Hale Research & Sbig ST6 camera on a telescope, we were all amazed at the images obtained using short exposures.

In those days purchasing a commercial CCD camera was a very expensive proposition.

The only camera available in my price range was the Sbig ST4, which was advertised as a guider but was capable of producing images. So when we discovered that Richard Berry & Co. had written a book about building your own at reasonable costs we all got very interested.

We all purchased the book & proceeded to hunt for the necessary parts in this country to build the power source & the CB 245 camera which had a larger chip that the ST4 camera.

One member of the group did have a workshop with all the machinery to manufacture the camera bodies etc. & all the metal was obtained from a local scrap metal merchant.

So by mid1995 all the components were obtained & a start was made to build them. The first was completed that year & the second a little later & my one was started in the summer of 1996 & was completed late in the September, working on them in the spare time, they all had different variations to the original Cookbook design, with mine completed & ready for testing on the night sky, the weather then decided to turn nasty & the first astronomical image wasn't achieved until late in the October. I was quite pleased with the results but I had a few technical problems with the equipment, like the water pumps packing up, but being in the motor trade ample supplies of different car windscreen washer pumps were tried & tested but they all packed up after a short period.

So I eventually rectified the problem by using a low-pressure fountain pump bought from the local aquarium shop, then I started to get bad connection problems with the power source & camera connections. Eventually all the problems were solved & for over a period of years I managed to build up quite a list of objects imaged.

The total cost of each camera was about £500 considerably cheaper than the near equivalent Sbig ST6 camera.

The only advantage I've got in this area is my back yard faces due south & so the lights from the main road do not encroach directly upon my observing site, although my area of viewable sky is very restricted from about 20 degrees up from my local horizon to the pole & about 1.5 hours either side of the meridian, I have managed to image a great many objects over the years.

Up until 2002 I was using a 250mm f6 Newtonian on a Fullerscopes MkIV mount which was driven in RA only.

Having gained a lot of experience with the set up & use of a CCD camera & having retired from business, I splashed out & purchased a Starlight Xpress MX7colour camera with the Star 2000 auto guiding system, I also upgraded to a 350mm f4.5 Orion Optics Newtonian tube assembly & attached it on the old heavy mount, I also upgraded the telescope drive to a AWR goto system, which has been a great help in cutting the amount of time locating many objects which I have great difficulty seeing visually but at least I know that they are in the field of view of an medium eyepiece, some nights if I manage to set up the goto coordinates accurately the object can be found on the camera chip straight away.

I can now image deep sky objects with reasonable success down to about magnitude 16 - 18 with guiding in the auto mode, the main problem now is the local council have recently replaced the old low pressure sodium lamps with new high pressure lamps & this has contributed to a colour switch in the images I am taking with the MX7 camera, so I have to do more processing to the images to eliminate the overall colour cast.

I have tried using a CCD camera on a field trip to a dark sky site, but setting up & using a CCD camera in such an area is not a proposition to undertake lightly.

Even so with all the problems of deep sky observing & imaging from home, CCD’s have certainly helped my hobby of astronomy.

Bob Garner