Deep Sky Or Planetary?

There are more than these two forms of astrophotography but these two differ very much. One important thing is the fact that planets rotate, in fact the whole Universe does but within our own Solar System these rotations are very visible.. Jupiter rotates one full revolution in 10 hours so images from a video of ten minutes or a stack of videos over a period of thirty minutes show a different part of the planet. This effect has to be countered by derotation.

Planetary photography (including the Moon and the Sun) is due to the motion of everything in our solar system seriously different than Deep Sky. Stacking, freezing motion, deconvolution, denotation, video instead of still images, fast recording process instead of hours-nights-multiple nights, less precise polar alignment and very different software are all aspects that are very different. That is also a big reason for people to choose one or the other instead of doing both.

Deep Sky photography is not easier, make no mistake! It is different and has its own very big challenges that you do not want to underestimate! Polaralignment has to be extremely precise and still needs guiding by a second telescope and camera. Many many many hours of data have to be collected and stacked in order to get the more faint objects in an image.

I like doing them both and believe me when I say that that keeps you on your feet. Specifically at the start things can be quite confusing. The nice thing though is that once I got it into my system and useable results started rolling out of all that software I could fall back on my extensive experience in adjusting noise, contrast and sharpening to do the end processing.

Soon more on this subject.