Is there any way I can set up a telescope, point it at a planet, galaxy, or star, connect it to a digital camera and experiment with allowing different “exposure” times?
I know this is how Hubble works. The longer you let the camera be exposed to a section of sky, the more photons you will record on the image.
Any way I can play with something like this at home, even if it is with a puny little telescope? It would be very fun…
Nope, won’t work. Hubble has two things going for it, one of which you don’t have. The first you already mentioned… a telescope combined with a time-lapse shutter. However, the CCD on your camera is insufficient to take images of any significant quality (compared to the Hubble), AND the Hubble’s camera is sensitive to UV anf infrared frequencies, which your camera is not.
At best, you can probably take some pretty kickass pictures of the Moon.
Yup, it’ll work great. Here’s an amateur pic of the ISS taken with an 8” telescope. You can even tell that the shuttle is docked. A quick google on astrophotography will give you an idea of the sort of images a talented and dedicated backyard astronomer can expect.
Regardless of Spoof’s answer, if your camera can do long exposures, it can be made to work. Even if it can’t do LONG exposures, it can be made to work to some degree.
If you have an SLR style (with interchanged lens) digital camera, it can be made to work very well. You can do prime focus work with this type of camera using off the shelf SLR adapters. You might still be surprised by how much you can get doing afocal work.
Here is a link to a digital camera astrophotography discussion group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digital_astro/ Probably lots of good info for you in there.
Here is a webite about the same subject: http://velatron.com/dca/ Check the FAQ, very nice. It has a big section on afocal setup to be used with about any type of digital camera.
Not only that, if you get the right software you can take a series of exposures over a period of days, weeks, or maybe even months, combine them and get beautiful pictures of galxies.
You need to make sure there is a star in the frame that you can use as 0,0 reference in your coordinate system. The software will then add the pixels together on a pixel by pixel basis. Since the galaxy is always there and you get a few photons in the same pixel or pixels each time, that signal adds directly according to the number of exposures. The noise only appears sporadically in any particular pixel and it adds as the sqrt( number of exposures) so the signal to noise is improved by sqrt(number of exposures.
Remember that in order to take really long exposures of the sky, your telescope must have a motor drive that will track with the movement across the sky of the object you are photographing.
A few consumer digicams are capable of near infreared work. The original Dimage 7 I use doesn’t have an IR filter in the CCD but all the later versions do.
As David Simmons hinted, the only real problem with using a digital camera to do astrophotography (or any extended exposures) is that the CCD (the thing that senses the photons) is inherently noisy. The noise gets worse as you increase the sensitivity (e.g. simulating faster film) or increase the time of exposure. Noise also increases with temperature. So you can reduce noise by cooling the CCD (which works well because cold nights are usually clear nights) and by overlapping multiple exposures of the same scene. Some cameras also have internal noise reduction algorithms that automatically come into play during low light exposures.
I would LOVE to see a consumer camera and a consumer telescope take pictures of distant galaxies.
Here ya go, Spoofe. http://velatron.com/dca/personal/
This looks to be just a dedicated amateur’s page. Meade telescope and a Nikon 995 consumer digital camera.
This place http://www.ckcpower.com/ sells adapters to connect digital cameras to different scopes.