CCD Imaging Primer
	Imaging Made Easy and Fun!

There is a simple mathematical relationship between exposure and image quality: more exposure = better image quality. How far you want to take this relationship is entirely up to you! There are two approaches to getting long exposure times: take a single, long exposure take a whole bunch of short exposures and add them together The former approach inevetibly requires a guiding system of some kind. This means either a separate guidescope and camera, a second CCD chip in the imaging camera, or a self-guiding system such as Starlight Xpress' STAR2000.

1x30 seconds = ½ minute

42x30 seconds = 21 minutes

The dramatic illustration at right (M27 imaged from the city) shows the power of adding images together! Single, short MX5C exposures look particularly bad (much more so than the B&W MX5 series cameras), but when you add a bunch of them together the result is nothing short of magic!

The first approach means there are fewer (or perhaps only one) image files to store (and process!) on your hard drive. But to do long exposures requires either a very expensive telescope mount or a complicated guiding setup, or perhaps both. So, we'll plead poverty (and laziness!) and take a whole bunch of short exposures (30 seconds or whatever we can manage) with our modest equipment (hard drive space is pretty cheap anyway, right?).

Running 30 second exposures, it's easy to get tens or even hundreds of megabytes of image files in a single night. If you want to archive your raw and/or processed image files, CD-ROM burners are quite economical (and soon DVD burners!). This is how I archive my image files.