Astronomy and DSLR Astrophotography Blog

Canon’s low-priced range of Digital Single Lens Reflexive (DSLR) cameras are extremely popular between amateur astrophotographers. In this group we can find the following cameras as they appeared on the market:

• Canon Rebel (300D)
• Canon Rebel XT (350D)
• Canon Rebel XTi (400D)
• Canon Rebel XSi (450D)

The first Canon Rebel was published in 2003 and since then the astrophotography began also more popular and reachable to everyone.
There is a lot of reasons why Rebels are so popular. I’ll try to emphasise the most important:

1. PRICE
   Until the announcement of Canon Rebel there were no other cameras for the reasonably good price delivering all the specifications that are needed for astrophotography. There were only a few astronomy CCD cameras available for high prices. With the Rebel everything changed. It has all the main features needed for astrophotography and it is providing excellent picture quality for low amount of money.
2. SENSOR SIZE
   The Rebels’ sensors are the APS-C size (22.7 x 15.1mm) witch works pretty well for astrophotography because it covers a large area on the sky with any optical instrument.
3. PREVIEW ON LCD
   We are always able to check the focus, the object, field of view etc. on the LCD. It’s one of the most useful things and here DSLRs beats even much more expensive CCD cameras.
4. HIGH SENSITIVITY
   The ISO setting ranges from ISO100 to ISO1600 and more. The picture quality is still OK at high ISO settings and with combining we can get practically noiseless images.
5. PICTURE QUALITY
   Picture quality is just outstanding for this price. At high ISO setting and long exposures the pictures are still useful.
6. DAYLIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY
   The camera you use for astrophotography can still be used for daylight photography unless you modified it. That saves you a lot of money since you don’t need two cameras – one for astrophotography and another for daylight photography.
7. DIGITAL FORMAT
   It’s quite obvious that images from digital camera are in digital format, isn’t is ? Digital pictures are much more fond for post-processing then scanned film.
8. MODIFICATION
   With modifications we can get out even more from Rebels – if we remove the filter in front of the CMOS sensor the camera becomes much more sensitive for H-α part of spectrum and we are able to get more information with shorter exposures.
9. VIEWFINDER
   Viewfinder is extremely handy when we are positioning the camera to deep-sky object. It saves us a lot of time. With the CCDs we are forced to take multiple exposures just to specify the right location and angle of the camera and that’s really time-consuming.
10. CONNECTIVITY WITH PC
    All the Rebels can be remotely controlled with a PC. They comes with the most basic software but on the web you can find a software that turns your Canon Rebel to the fully remote camera!

Of course, there are not only advantages of DSLRs. They have many cons and their quality is not on the same level as CCDs but with some skills we can turn them for really good astrocameras.

Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The most popular DSLR for astrophotography – Canon 300D/Rebel
2. The best guides for Canon Digital Rebel modification
3. Canon Rebel XS Review
4. Astrophotography How-To Tutorial: Part II – Camera settings
5. Astrophotography for beginners: Star trails

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