What you see, what you get

[owlice]

What you see (with your naked eye through the telescope) is not what you get (with a camera through the telescope).

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

(I'm sure you knew that already; still, to me the video is a nice illustration of it.)

[orin stepanek]

Frankly; I'm amazed that anybody could see Jupiter that well! When I look at it it is more like a bright star!

[Chris Peterson]

What you see (with your naked eye through the telescope) is not what you get (with a camera through the telescope).

I have a little description on my site about the lucky imaging technique, with Mars as an example. The seeing is almost always poor over Colorado, so it's really the only way of getting good images here. And through the eyepiece, the planets are rarely worth the effort.

[THX1138]

I’ve wondered about this exact thing for awhile now, I’ve got a 10 inch mead reflector that I take out to the desert now and then “ Such as boating trips out to Lake Mead and etc “ But everything is, well stars are just a bunch of light flying at you, nothing to focus on there. The planets are generally some fuzzy blurry object and the only thing that is cool to look at is the moon, most especially when it’s just a small sliver of a moon.
But you say that even the big telescopes that I dream about being able to see through someday are, well you don’t see planets through them crystal clearly either? That’s terrible news to me.
So the only way to ever see those beautiful images of planets and, well everything and anything in the universe is by using a camera Owlice? As in no one has a giant enough telescope that one can just look through and see stuff like that? I can’t tell you how much I hate hearing that.
Then also what is the sense in spending a fortune on a camera for your telescope when you can just purchase a picture of whatever it is you want one of.
Dam this sucks, I want to look through a telescope and be able to see stuff like you see in pictures and that’s never going to happen is it, I really wish I didn’t just learn that.
Life was much better dreaming about getting to see through a giant scope someday and seeing……………………
I’m disappointed and that is an understatement astronomical in proportion.

[geckzilla]

I think generally any of the large telescopes with adaptive optics can see pretty clearly. Haha, I bet it takes quite a trek to get to most of them. Do they even allow interested visitors? Maybe try a solar observatory, too? But the best view is simply not from under our atmosphere. You can always examine Hubble's data over at the HLA which is definitely very interesting and more than I could ever hope for, personally.

[owlice]

THX1138, I look through the telescopes at the local university observatory and despite seeing oh, so so many images from the heavens, it is still thrilling to see the Gallilean moons of Jupiter with mine own eyes! And the rings of Saturn!!! And I don't have clear vision for bright sources on a dark background; I get a good bit of haloing and glare even with corrective lenses, nor is the moon ever round for me. Still, seeing these things myself -- it's thrilling! Hie thee to an observatory open house, or to a star party near you and find out for yourself!!

[Chris Peterson]

But you say that even the big telescopes that I dream about being able to see through someday are, well you don’t see planets through them crystal clearly either? That’s terrible news to me.

As a rule, large telescopes do not provide better views. Their only visual advantage is that they allow for more magnification, which is sometimes desirable, but by no means always. Large telescopes are generally more affected by atmospheric seeing, and therefore it is common for the "clarity" to be worse... although during brief moments of good seeing you will have higher resolution. It takes a lot of observing practice to take advantage of large optics.

So the only way to ever see those beautiful images of planets and, well everything and anything in the universe is by using a camera Owlice? As in no one has a giant enough telescope that one can just look through and see stuff like that? I can’t tell you how much I hate hearing that.

Many people enjoy the immediacy of a direct view of objects through telescope optics. They enjoy the observational challenge of teasing out detail visually. But the reality is, our eyes are very poor sensors compared with cameras. Outside of the Sun and Moon, there is no astronomical object that you will ever come close to observing visually with the same quality as even a cheap camera can provide.

Then also what is the sense in spending a fortune on a camera for your telescope when you can just purchase a picture of whatever it is you want one of.

By this logic, you shouldn't even be taking pictures. After all, Ansel Adams or some other famous photographer has already been there. Astronomical imagers take pictures for the joy of the hunt, the challenge of capturing a difficult object. And sometimes they get something that nobody has seen quite that way before. The sky is full of objects that have barely been imaged at all.

Certainly, imaging does not need to be expensive. A good quality mass produced telescope and an ordinary digital camera are sufficient to produce very nice images. Planetary imaging is even less demanding, requiring only a cheap webcam.

[Ann]

Chris Peterson wrote:
Many people enjoy the immediacy of a direct view of objects through telescope optics. They enjoy the observational challenge of teasing out detail visually. But the reality is, our eyes are very poor sensors compared with cameras. Outside of the Sun and Moon, there is no astronomical object that you will ever come close to observing visually with the same quality as even a cheap camera can provide.

Hmmm, I beg to differ. I have loved watching bright stars through the telescope and watch their color "spring to life" in the eyepiece. The "truth" and "immediacy" of their color as seen through the telescope made the stars amazingly "real" and "personal" to me.

It's pretty nice to view Saturn through a telescope too, even if you don't see many more details than the fantastic rings.

Ann

[Chris Peterson]

Chris Peterson wrote:
Many people enjoy the immediacy of a direct view of objects through telescope optics. They enjoy the observational challenge of teasing out detail visually. But the reality is, our eyes are very poor sensors compared with cameras. Outside of the Sun and Moon, there is no astronomical object that you will ever come close to observing visually with the same quality as even a cheap camera can provide.

Hmmm, I beg to differ. I have loved watching bright stars through the telescope and watch their color "spring to life" in the eyepiece. The "truth" and "immediacy" of their color as seen through the telescope made the stars amazingly "real" and "personal" to me.

It's pretty nice to view Saturn through a telescope too, even if you don't see many more details than the fantastic rings.

Nevertheless, even through a telescope, the eyes are poor sensors of stars compared with cameras. For somebody who enjoys visual observing, there are many opportunities for enjoyment. But in terms of color, in terms of contrast, in terms of resolution, in terms of dynamic range... a camera always beats the eye. You have to approach the comparison subjectively, not objectively.

[Ann]

Chris wrote:
But in terms of color, in terms of contrast, in terms of resolution, in terms of dynamic range... a camera always beats the eye. You have to approach the comparison subjectively, not objectively.

I agree with you, Chris. Nevertheless, it has been enormously important to me to know and understand the visual colors of the stars. Of course there are so many things about them that I could never know by looking at a star through a telescope, such as if the star is metal-rich or metal-poor.

But because I know what colors star come in, I feel I understand the color of galaxies quite well. I don't have to have seen a galaxy in order to imagine, very well, what color it is and how its colors change over the face of it. I can look at a picture of a galaxy and compare it with the B-V index of it, which I learn from my software. Then I have a great grasp of the galaxy.

I have a big problem with planetary nebulae, because I don't understand their color. I have never seen color in a planetary nebula. Yes, I know that the two dominant colors of planetaries are OIII and Ha emission, but it bothers me tremendously that I don't know what color OIII emission really is. I know it is blue-green, but I don't know the exact shade of it. I have a big problem with some shades of blue-green, which I find quite ugly. Bluish shades of cyan, on the other hand, are often pleasing to me. So when I look at a picture of a planetary, I ask myself whether I would like the color of it if I could see it, or if it would turn me off.

Photos of planetaries are of no help. The colors of planetaries are wildly divergent in photographs, and it really bothers me. Photographs have not helped me understand planetaries at all, not in the way I need to understand them. I have no grasp of planetaries.

Ann

[stephen63]

Chris Peterson wrote:
Many people enjoy the immediacy of a direct view of objects through telescope optics. They enjoy the observational challenge of teasing out detail visually. But the reality is, our eyes are very poor sensors compared with cameras. Outside of the Sun and Moon, there is no astronomical object that you will ever come close to observing visually with the same quality as even a cheap camera can provide.

Hmmm, I beg to differ. I have loved watching bright stars through the telescope and watch their color "spring to life" in the eyepiece. The "truth" and "immediacy" of their color as seen through the telescope made the stars amazingly "real" and "personal" to me.

It's pretty nice to view Saturn through a telescope too, even if you don't see many more details than the fantastic rings.

Ann

I think you are both correct. Although it's true that our eyes are not as sensitive as a CCD or a CMOS, we could easily spend many an enjoyable evening just looking at the cosmos without any visual aid at all (well, maybe some eyeglasses), or looking through binoculars or a telescope. It's almost hard to believe that Galileo Galilei or Charles Messier managed to accomplish anything without a camera, but they did! By the same token, I get just as much enjoyment from an evening of astro-imaging, and seeing tangible results.

[THX1138]

Indeed stephen63, the lenses in Galileo Galilei's telescope were so small it is almost unimaginable that he could see anything yet he did. It surly must have taken him hundreds and hundreds of hours of observation, talk about devotion to his work wow.