In article ,
Esmail Bonakdarian wrote:

John Steinberg wrote:

Esmail Bonakdarian wrote:

The camera is the Canon PowerShot S400.

I used one, briefly, recently. Thought it was well made and fairly
feature rich. Only problem, for me, was that it's a wee bit too small.

Hi John,

Well, I made the track to the local Best Buy and was simply surprised how
tiny the S400 is.

Now I am thinking of getting the A70 instead. While it's only 3.2 megapixels
instead of 4, it does have full manual controls, and a video mode of 640x480
(instead 320x200 for the S400).

I am thinking that the video mode might come in handy for collecting and
then later stacking images, but I know very little about astro photography
at this point. This camera might give me a good starting point for
exploring.

Still, having full control over settings is a plus.

And the camera isn't so tiny that I might forget or step on it ;-) but
still not a big huge hunk of technology. And it's $100-150 cheaper. I
can't see why I would need to have 4 megapixels at this point. I don't
plan on printing poster sized pics, mostly just put them on-line and
print out a few in "regular" print size (5x7?).

The reason you might want 4 megtapixels is for cropping daytime photos.
Especially with moving objects (like kids) I find myself mostly using
the camera zoomed out (wide angle), and later cropping away the
extraneous parts of the image on my computer. If you throw away the
outer half of a 4 MP image, you still have a 2 MP image left. If you
ever print 8x10s, 2 MP is about the minimum. So, using a camera with
more pixels than you need functions as a useful type of digital zoom.
The worst thying to do is zoom in, and then mmiss your subject because
they move. Another reason for favoring the wide end of the zoom is its
faster f/ratio. As an example, the S400 is f/2.8 at its wide end, but
only f/4.9 at its telephoto end. Large flash cards (I use a 256 MB card
in my S400) are cheap enough, so in-camera storage isn't a problem. As
for its small size, the benefit is pocketabiliity -- carrrying it in
your pocket whenever you go somewhere that might be interesting.


I wonder if anyone has used the Canon A70 successfully for some astro
pics ... I certainly would try out various things.

Esmail
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Esmail Bonakdarian - esmailATmyrealboxDOTcom - http://www.cs.mercer.edu/bonak
32N 83W