by RJ Emery » Thu Nov 23, 2006 5:20 pm
ta152h0 wrote:the second half of my reply. I have a NIKON D70 and a 1000 mm lens attachment. What filter to use to take a photo of the sun ( I admit I know a lot of stuff but I am a rookie at astro pictures- noone evers lets out how they took the pictures that appear on APOD )
I've been thinking about your desire to do astrophotography, and I have to ask the question, why bother? There was a time when if one wanted a picture of something, one either had to pay for it from an observatory or planetarium, or make your own. Today, for just about anything above our heads, there are any number of images made by big telescopes and posted on the Internet ready for downloading.
Every picture snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope is available online, and since the HST is just slightly better than my backyard reflector, I see no point to making observations or images on my own. Just about every image made by any telescope on earth or in space is similarly available on the Internet, so the need for amateur astrophotography just escapes me.
A far more useful project for amateurs (like myself), for example, would be to make careful photometric observations of long period phenomena, something to which professional astronomers can't justify dedicating precious telescope time or other resources.
[quote="ta152h0"]the second half of my reply. I have a NIKON D70 and a 1000 mm lens attachment. What filter to use to take a photo of the sun ( I admit I know a lot of stuff but I am a rookie at astro pictures- noone evers lets out how they took the pictures that appear on APOD )[/quote]
I've been thinking about your desire to do astrophotography, and I have to ask the question, why bother? There was a time when if one wanted a picture of something, one either had to pay for it from an observatory or planetarium, or make your own. Today, for just about anything above our heads, there are any number of images made by big telescopes and posted on the Internet ready for downloading.
Every picture snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope is available online, and since the HST is just slightly better than my backyard reflector, I see no point to making observations or images on my own. Just about every image made by any telescope on earth or in space is similarly available on the Internet, so the need for amateur astrophotography just escapes me.
A far more useful project for amateurs (like myself), for example, would be to make careful photometric observations of long period phenomena, something to which professional astronomers can't justify dedicating precious telescope time or other resources.