The Amateur Astrophotographer Robert J. Vanderbei PRINCETON UNIVERSITY,PRINCETON, NJ 08544 E-mail address:
[email protected] THE AMATEUR ASTROPHOTOGRAPHER Copyright c 2003 by Robert J. Vanderbei. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN 0-0000-0000-0 The text for this book was formated in Times-Roman using AMS-LATEX(which is a macro pack- age for Leslie Lamport’s LATEX, which itself is a macro package for Donald Knuth’s TEXtext formatting system) and converted to pdf format using PDFLATEX. All figures were incorporated into the text with the macro package GRAPHICX.TEX. Many thanks to Krisadee, Marisa, and Diana for putting up with many weary days following long sleepless nights. Contents Preface ix Part 1. Equipment and Techniques 1 Chapter 1. Introduction 3 1. Location, Location, Location 3 2. Is it Worth the Effort? 4 Chapter 2. Equipment 9 1. Choosing a Telescope 9 2. Choosing a Camera 14 Chapter 3. Image Acquisition 21 1. Polar Alignment 22 2. Attachments 24 3. Focusing 25 4. Finding Faint Fuzzies 26 Chapter 4. Image Processing 29 1. Raw Image Frames 29 2. Dark Frames 32 3. Bias and Flat Frames 33 4. Image Calibration 34 5. Stacking 37 6. Analyzing the Image 37 Chapter 5. Image Enhancement and Presentation 43 1.