Any Pitfalls while imaging with two DSLR's ?

[skycamper]

I think my imaging needs are going to move to using two wide field SV80ED's with .8 Focal reducers/field flatteners, stacked on a NEQ6 with a DSI 2 50mm guider.  

 

Looking to not reinvent the wheel with regards to framing and focusing two cameras using BYE premium edition.  

 

Can two telescopes be aimed at the same thing or at least close when just stacking the scope rings on each other with a dovetail between them?  Will they be automatically looking at the same object?  

 

Having to image from a red zone means I need more subs and imaging at F5 wide field with two cameras seems to be the way to go to keep more subs and minimize tracking errors. 

 

How is dithering affected by using two cameras? Does BYE account for this? 

 

Any ideas or links disscussing this is appricated.

Abraham

[admin]

Please take a look at the dual camera section in the BYE 3.1.5 user manual;  it explains how to use 2+ cameras and still do dithering.  You will have 2 instances of BYE, a master and a slave.  The master controls the capture plan connected to 1 camera and the slave connected to the other camera will duplicate all TakePicture commands initiated from the master instance.

 

Regards,

[astroman133]

The scopes will only be pointed at the same target, if you align them to be pointed at the same target.  They will have to be focused separately, and focus will need to be adjusted separately.

 

If you are expecting to combine the data from both cameras into a single image, then you will need to ensure that your cameras are oriented very close to the same.  If they are not then you will have alignment artifacts around the edges that will cause excessive cropping.

 

Of course you will also need to take different sets of calibration frames (darks, flats, dark flats) for each camera.

 

I would suggest processing the data from each camera separately (calibration, normalization, grading, aligning, combining), and then aligning and combining the 2 resulting images into one before doing any post processing.

 

I would say that what you are trying to do would fall into the moderately advanced category. You should become very comfortable with the software and techniques of a single camera setup and processing images from that setup before opting to double everything.