SeeStar vs DSLR vs Cooled Astro Camera: How do they compare?

[Music] so tonight I want to compare the sear s50 to my cooled Astro camera as well as my Canon 6D DSLR and this is a basic unmodified DSLR camera that's quite popular for astronomy and it is a full-frame camera whereas my apsc camera that's the ASI 2600 MC Duo that's also a very popular uh cooled camera for astrophotography and both the DSLR and the cooled camera are going to be tested with the ascar f300 which is a 60 mm quintuplet aore refractor and the refractor also has a focal ratio of F5 just like the SE star so this will be a good comparison and the targets I'm going to be testing on tonight are messia 13 the Hercules cluster and that's a good Target because it is fairly small and fairly bright and it's a Broadband object so I can test both the cooled DSLR the Astro camera as well as the sear on that and then I will also be testing all three of these on the veil nebula and for that I'll be using the built-in Duo band filter in the sear and I'll be using an idas nbz 2 filter on both the cooled Astro camera as well as the unmodified Canon 6D DSLR camera and the veil nebula is is quite large the entire Veil doesn't fit in the field of view whereas with the cooled Astro camera as well as the fullframe DSLR I should be able to capture the entire Veil nebula complex so this will be a good demonstration of the difference in the field of view so let's see what we can get tonight the sky is looking pretty clear now over most of the sky and there is the constellation of signis we are first going to get some data from the refractor with the cooled Astro camera and in the meantime I've got the zwc star right over here set up okay I've transferred everything to the computer and let's take a look and see what we've got I've rotated both the Canon 6D and the cooled Astro camera image counterclockwise to make them look vertical uh just like the sear so it'll be easier to compare so at the very left we have the SE star image in the middle we have the Canon 6D image and on the right we have the apsc camera the ASI 26 600 MC dual and right away you can see that the massia 13 looks much larger in the sear image but if I zoom out you can see that uh that the field of view is fairly small which is why it looks larger um and the Canon 6D and the cool asro camera image you can see that there is a lot of empty space around the main target if we zoom in on the center in each of the other two images as well we can do a better job of comparing them now the sear image again looks very good and we can see quite a few faint stars in the outer periphery of the cluster and so this is a 23 minutes of exposure time on each of these setups now compared to the sear image we can see that the Canon 6D image looks smaller and that's because the Canon 6D has much larger 6.54 Micron pixels instead of the 2.9 Micron pixels on the sea star and in the sea star image on the left you can see this tiny little magnitude 15 Galaxy zoom into it a bit more this little fuzzy patch Zoom back to 100% And in the cannon image the Galaxy is here it it's still there this little fuzzy patch but it is a little bit harder to see because it's a smaller there now looking at the cool Astro camera image the Galaxy is over here fairly easy to see but pretty small because it is a magnitude 15 Galaxy but looking at the cluster itself we can see more stars in that image and the stars are sharper and smaller than either the Canon 6D image or the sear image so if I had to rate these I would say the ASI 2600 MC image uh is the best you can see uh the most stars in the outer regions of the cluster as well uh the stars are a lot smaller uh second I would say the SE star shows the second highest number of stars overall and the stars look pretty good and you can see a good amount of detail in the outer regions of the cluster and last place for me would be the Canon 6D image even though the large pixels are pretty good they are better matched for a scope with a long focal length instead of a 300 mm focal length uh refractor okay so now we can flip through all three of these images and this is at 100% Zoom C star cooled Camera DSLR sear cooled Camera DSLR now let's do a different kind of comparison this time we'll open them up with the drizzle option enabled so since I got a fairly large number of subexposures I also used drizzle integration so when combining the images that'll give me some extra resolution because Messier 13 is a fairly small Target so once again uh the very left is the sear image in the middle is the Canon 6D image and on the very right is the ASI 2600 MC cooled camera image so I'm going to zoom in to 100% and you can see it created a much larger image with the drizzle integration and the middle image the Canon 6D we zoomed that into 100% it looks like that did somewhat benefit as well so uh at 100% magnification the sear image still looks great seems to have benefited quite a bit from the drizzle integration and you can see a lot of detail and the little Galaxy is up here that's the magnitude 15 Galaxy so it's just visible looking at the Canon 6D image in the middle the cluster is not quite as detailed as it is in the SE star image and finally at the very right the cooled Astro camera uh you can see a lot more faint stars in the outer regions of the cluster and again that looks looks uh quite a bit better so we've got the sear Canon 6D cooled camera Sear Canon 6D cooled camera I mean the carar did really hold its own against the other competitors and again these images are completely raw just simply calibrated and stacked so these images have not been processed at all Now using something like blur exterminator I'm sure you can get better results uh but uh not everyone has blur exterminator which is why I didn't uh factor that in but if we apply a little bit of blur exterminator just to see how it cleans up the Stars so that definitely improved things for the sear let's just apply the blur exterminator to all three of the images definitely improved things but I think that might still be a little bit heavy-handed I don't like to overprocess anything so if I was actually processing them I would probably drop uh sharpen stars to maybe 0.1 or even lower okay so the image with the cooled Astro camera didn't improve that much because it was pretty good to start with it was already quite sharp now let's compare all of these so we've got the sear Canon 6D and the cooled Astro camera when you actually display the images you won't be displaying them like that it would be more something like this maybe so the difference might not be quite as great at that point so if I stretch them yeah as you can see they are looking a little bit closer now overall uh than they appear when they're fully auto stretched and uh let's let's do the same thing to the Canon one as well and as you can see also looks pretty nice however it still it uh still doesn't have as much detail in the actual cluster uh compared to the sear and the cooled Astro camera so let's pull up our second target now this is the veil nebula okay now we can do a better comparison so this is an interesting Target because it is so much larger than the other targets and this uh highlights uh one of the main weaknesses of the sear which is that it has a pretty small sensor so even though it captures a good amount of detail it can't take in you know massive Vistas like uh like the DSLR or the apsc cooled Astro camera can so let's see how it Compares on this Target and for this target I was using the built-in nebula filter the Dual Band filter on the sear and on both the Canon 6D and the cooled Astro camera I was using an idas nbz 2 Duo band filter it's very similar to the nebula filter in the SE star however it is narrower so it lets in less light pollution so comparing all three of these images at 100% Zoom we can see that the SE star does have a significantly larger image scale than the Canon 6D even though it doesn't have its field of view and I think the Canon 6D was hamstrung a little bit by the fact that I was using a dual band filter on an unmodified camera and it wasn't letting in a ton of theh alpha light uh compared to the other two setups now looking at the last image which is the cool Astro camera uh that's definitely the best so far the colors are very nice the detail is very very nice the stars look great and very sharp and if I was displaying these images at their regular brightness uh we can use screen transfer function to kind of simulate that the $3,000 setup um it does look better but it's not that far off from the SE star except the fact that that it is able to capture the entire Veil nebula in one go let me know in the comments below if you found this comparison helpful if you are trying to upgrade from an old DSLR camera and you might be wondering whether to go for a cool Astro camera or a smart telescope like the sea star hopefully you found this review helpful and if there are any other topics that you want me to cover on this channel or any other comparisons that you want me to do I just post it in the comments below and I will do my best to get that done thanks again for watching and clear skies

Channel: AbdurAstro

Views: 4,412

Keywords: astrophotography, dslr, astro camera, asi2600mc duo, seestar, Canon 6D, dslr vs astro camera, budget telescope, telescope, review, telescope comparison, astro camera comparison, astrophotography camera, how to astrophotography, canon astrophotography, canon 6D, Best astrophotography setup, best astrophotography camera, budget astrophotography

Id: 3rIkKTcv_AQ

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2024