Probably any ambitious astrofotographer likes to operate with a high-quality b/w CCD camera incl. filterwheel. With the beginning of the year 2015 I have fulfilled the dream and bought a Moravian CCD with integrated 5-tray filterwheel. And I also continue to work on perfecting my garden observatory.

CCD Camera

A good b/w CCD camera has in comparison to a DSLR at first glance many disadvantages. It is expensive. One must expose for a color image at least three times as long. The color channels have to be reassembled in the image processing, which makes this much more difficult. It is heavy and can only be adapted to an existing eyepiece extension. It usually has no Liveview mode - which makes focusing difficult and you need new software for recording control.

So why do you do that? Very easily. If you do everything right, the picture quality of a CCD is hard to beat. In principle, the resolution and sharpness of a CCD is superior to a DSLR by providing the full resolution to a color channel. In the case of a DSLR, the three color channels must share one pixel. In practice, each color actually has only a quarter pixel. CCD cameras specially developed for astrophotography also have a significantly higher light sensitivity.

With an automatic filter wheel, recording series can be programmed thanks to suitable control software and, above all, narrow-band filters can also be used.

Filerwheel

The Moravian 8300 FW has a built-in filterwheel, which offers 5 positions for 1.25 "screw filters or 31mm untrayed filters. However, these 1.25" filters showed a clear vignetting of the image edges. So I switched to the 31mm of Astronomic. A complete filter set consists of red, green, blue, luminance for the color photographs and H-Alpha 6nm, OIII 12nm and SII 12nm for the narrow-band images.

Motorfocus

As already mentioned, the focusing with a CCD is much more complicated than with the Liveview mode of a DSLR. In principle, you have to take a picture, assess the sharpness and then blindly turn something at the focus knob. After that the same game starts from the beginning - until you have reached the optimum focus point. Since I was manually annoying in the long run, I have invested in a mounting kit for a Motorfocus by Riegel Systems. So I can adjust the focus from the Mac extremely precisely, also remote from the living room, if need.

The mounted setup

Like as in the following picture, my setup looked like when I am photographing at night.