 When starting out with Deep Sky Astro Photography, is it better to go with a modified DSLR or a dedicated astronomy camera? I've noticed this question can get really heated with strong advocates for both camps. My opinion is it really depends on your specific goals, your budget, your past experience with photography, and the list goes on from there. The point being, this is not really an easy answer, it's not an easy question. That's why I think it's the perfect question for a long video where we can really explore all the ins and outs. So what I'm gonna do in this video is take this beginner setup right here of the cheapest go-to mount, the cheapest dual band filter for emission nebulae, and the cheapest Apple Chromatic telescope, and then show you the difference in both workflow and final results when attaching a modified DSLR to this setup versus attaching a dedicated astronomy camera. And I tested these two cameras on a single night with this setup capturing the Crescent Nebula. And so you're gonna see the final results compared towards the end of the video. But along the way, we're gonna see that there are plenty of pros and cons to both approaches. And if you're still unsure yourself, which way to go by the end of this video, I've put together an additional resource, which is an online quiz that may help you decide which is the right camera for you. Hey everyone, this is Nico Carver and my YouTube channel, Nebula Photos, all about astrophotography with a particular focus on videos for beginners. And this video is for beginners as well, but it's for the kind of beginner that is pretty all in on wanting to do deep sky astrophotography, meaning taking pictures of nebulae and star clusters and galaxies. And for someone who has that interest, there is often a debate between what camera is best for a beginner between a modified DSLR, meaning one where the IR cut filter, the internal IR cut filter has been changed out, and a dedicated astronomy camera. And so that's what I'm gonna cover in this video, but before we get into all the comparisons and tests between these two, I have just a few quick disclosures. This camera, the Agma AP26CC was lent to me by Agma which is a newer company that's based out of North Carolina in the United States. And Agma's goal is to offer astronomy cameras at a low price point as low as they can, which is often hundreds of dollars cheaper than the competition while offering U.S. based support and repair service. So I think that's a pretty cool mission. And at least for my initial test here, this camera works very well. So I do recommend checking them out. This HA-modded Canon SL2 was sent to me by Night Sky Camera, which is a great company out of Vancouver, Canada. They ship worldwide and they sell pre-modified DSLRs like this one or you can send yours in to get it modified. And this Canon SL2 that I'm holding was actually donated to the channel by Night Sky Camera so that I can give it away, which I'm gonna be doing very soon as part of my latest image critique of my subscribers astrophotos. So watch out for that video, especially if you entered the critique and giveaway back in November. This mount, the Sky Watcher Star Adventurer GTI is on long-term loan from Sky Watcher USA and this filter, the SV Bony SV220 is a new dual-band narrowband filter on the market that was sent to me for evaluation by astrogear.net who has this filter for sale as well as many other affordable products from SV Bony, Explore Scientific, and they also have modified cameras as well. And then the Ascar FMA-180 Pro telescope and the guiding gear were both bought with proceeds from my Patreon campaign and I'll say more about that at the very end of the video. Okay, that's it for the disclosures for this one. So let's start with who I'm imagining when I'm putting a kit together like this one. The person I'm imagining is deciding between a modified DSLR and an astronomy camera. And this person has maybe tried astrophotography a bit already, either with a basic telescope and their smartphone attached or maybe with a DSLR and lens on a fixed tripod. And this person may live in the city or the suburbs or like me in a rural area, but this kit is going to work with any of those situations. You could have plenty of light pollution and this kit is still gonna work from home. And that's why I'm including a dual narrowband filter in this kit because this is the very best kind of filter to get for blocking heavy light pollution if you're interested in capturing emission nebulae. And to be clear, that's the only type of deep sky object that this kind of filter excels at. It can capture them both in our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy and many showpiece objects are emission nebulae, but it can also capture them in close by other galaxies like Messier 31, Messier 33. The ones that appear larger in the sky are perfect for capturing the nebulae within the galaxy. Other than light pollution, washing out the contrast in photos, another problem with light pollution and city imaging is it can be hard to find the objects in the night sky because the usual way of finding things is star hopping, but sometimes you can't even see the stars if it's really heavy light pollution. So that's why I'm including this go-to mount because as long as you do the alignment steps and get the settings correct, this mount should understand where it is on earth and how to point the telescope for you. And then last, I'm going with this little telescope right here. A lot of people wouldn't even recognize this as a telescope. This is the Asgar FMA-180 Pro and it's very good for the price in terms of correction and features. And then I'm also putting on this, this is optional. This is a little guide scope and guide camera that will correct any little mistakes that the mount makes in tracking, but it also has some other features like you can dither between exposures more easily and different things like that. This telescope only has a focal length of 180 millimeters, which is not very long, so the guiding is really optional. And so, so far, everything that I've mentioned in this kit, not including the camera, is about $1,300. Once we add in everything we need, like a Bodnov mask and do-heater bands and power, let's say it's 1,500. The last piece is the camera. And let me first quickly say, if you already have a camera, you can and probably should just start with that. But let's say you either don't have a camera or you wanna get something new dedicated to astrophotography, then these are two good options right here. I'm comparing a modified Canon SL2 DSLR, which goes for around $500 pre-modified, or this Agma 26 CC, which goes for a little bit over $1,500. So the total base price of the kit with the DSLR is about 2,000. And with the dedicated astronomy camera, it goes up to 3,000. These are all just rounded off estimates. I realize the price of things changes all the time. So if you're watching this a year or two later, the prices have probably gone up. And prices are also different in different countries around the world. This is all US-based pricing. And also keep in mind, the total price is not including a computer to control the kit. But I will say that the astronomy camera requires a computer. It's absolutely necessary to run the kit because as you can see, this doesn't have a screen or any kind of memory to store your images. The computer has to control this. And also you have to save the images off the camera to the computer. The cube computer can be a laptop, but it could also be a mini PC, a Raspberry Pi, but you need some kind of computer to control this. On the other hand, with the DSLR, if we ditch the guiding system, we could control everything without a computer at all because the DSLR is a self-contained unit where it's possible to do everything just using the onboard controls and the screen and maybe an intervalometer. Let's next really get into these two cameras themselves and do a little bit of a technical comparison of the features of this particular modified DSLR and this particular astronomy camera that I've picked for this comparison today. Okay, first up we have pixel size and you can see I made sure that they were very similar because I didn't want that to be a factor in this comparison. So you can find modern DSLRs and modern astro cameras that have similar pixel size. I personally do like this pixel size of around four microns. You'll find cameras anywhere from like 2.9 microns up to six or seven microns on some full frame cameras. And I just sort of like this middle of the road in terms of pixel size. It goes well with many focal lengths we're used to in terms of telescopes anywhere from the 180 millimeter focal length I'm gonna be using for this comparison to up to a thousand millimeter focal length. This pixel size is sort of good for all of those. In terms of sensor size, they are a little bit different because Canon's version of crop sensor is a little bit smaller than the other brands but close enough, these are both crop sensor cameras. Read noise, this is where there is a big difference and you'll find that the modern astro cameras are picking the best Sony sensors which have very low read noise and that really does make a big difference when stacking for deep sky astrophotography. At a sort of unity ISO where it's a good match for dynamic range and read noise with the Canon SL2, we're at 2.37 electrons and the Agma with the IMX571 sensor is about half that at its best gain where that dual gain amplifier kicks in. That's a lot of terminology but the big point here is the Canon is going to be a lot noisier than the Agma unfortunately. And you'll find that a lot with Canon DSLRs that they're gonna be a lot noisier than an astro camera or a Sony mirrorless or that kind of thing. Now, the reason I am comparing a Canon DSLR to an astro camera and not a mirrorless like a Sony is those mirrorless cameras are often just as expensive as the astro camera. So then you really don't get the cost difference, right? And it sort of doesn't make as much sense unless you already have a mirrorless camera that you are not using anymore and wanna modify. But if you're buying something new, I think and budget is a main concern. I think that's sort of where you go for the cheap DSLR. Okay, in terms of cooling, there is no cooling on the DSLR and the Agma can go up to negative 40 Celsius below the ambient temperature. So this is really nice for a couple of reasons. One, it will really help with thermal noise, which is what causes hot pixels often in your images. Now, thermal noise can be taken care of a bit with matching dark frames, but then because we don't have regulated cooling on the Canon, it's sort of harder to take darks. Well, with the Agma, if you do wanna take darks, it's quite easy to match the temperature. So in terms of calibration, the cooling is really, really nice to match your dark frames to your light frames. In terms of weight, the Agma is a little bit heavier. This is with the battery and SD card in the Canon, it's still about 100 grams lighter than the dedicated astronomy camera with its big cooler and all metal construction. Okay, next up, we have power and the Canon has the option to run off batteries. So you can use LPE17 batteries or you could use a dummy battery. The dummy battery needs to supply 8.4 volts of power to the Canon, but they make these adapters to do that pretty easily. The Agma has to be 12 volt power. So you can either run it with direct current off a big battery like, you know, they make lithium ion batteries you can buy or many different kinds of batteries or you can plug it in and it does come with an AC to DC adapter. In terms of mounting, the Canon has the Canon EF bayonet system. So you can use all kinds of Canon lenses with it, of course, but you could also get a T-ring adapter and attach it to a telescope. The Agma has M42 thread, a screw adapter. So that's very easy too because there's lots of different ways we can take that and mount lenses and telescopes to that camera. Okay, next up we have control and the Canon has many options. You can control it with just an intervalometer. So that's just a little device that's very easy to set up. You just tell it how many pictures you wanna take at what length and it takes them. So you don't even need a computer. It also is supported by the popular ASI Air which is a little Raspberry Pi with custom software on it. It's made by the company ZWO. And then there's many computer systems that you can control the Canon with if you have appropriate software and connect it with a USB cable. The Agma is only gonna work with computers. Now, that doesn't mean it has to be a laptop. You could, of course, use a mini computer or a Raspberry Pi if you're running Linux. So there's lots of different options in terms of the kind of computer you're gonna use, but the Agma doesn't work with an intervalometer or an ASI Air. So the Canon has a couple extra options in terms of controlling it. And then file format, the Canon can do JPEG but for astrophotography, you would use RAW which in Canon RAW CR2 is just means the second version of Canon RAW CR2 is a very well-supported format. It's gonna work with most of the astrophotography stacking programs. FITS is also a well-established and well-supported format. It's basically the astronomy standard and that's what you're going to save in when using the Agma. You will need some kind of software that can understand the Agma and record in that format but it's pretty easy to find programs that can do that, whether it's APT or NINA or Sequence Generator Pro, there's tons of different options for control software that can save in that format. Next, let's actually go into the setup and use of these cameras. So this was just all the technical info but now let's get into sort of the more practical how-to of how you would use these cameras for astrophotography. Starting with the Canon, you're going to turn the camera on and put it into manual mode which is on this little top dial here, it's the M. Once in manual mode, we can set the shutter speed to bulb because we're gonna be using an intervalometer to control the exposures and I'm gonna set the ISO to 1600. Now for Canon DSLRs, 1600 is always a safe bet and it's the ISO value that I use the most often. In the menu system, we just wanna make sure that the file format is set to raw and that the image review is set to off because I don't want to waste battery with it showing pictures all the time. And then the last setting I always try to remember to set is we want the auto rotate set to off with some stacking software, the rotation if the images are auto rotated so that the width and the height are flipped or whatever, it can cause issues with calibration and things like that. So I always just turn that setting off just to be sure. And then in terms of attaching the Canon camera to the telescope, all we need is this 48 millimeter T-ring. I prefer this one made by William Optics because it's all one piece, but that 11 millimeters of space provided by the T-ring is going to give you the perfect 55 millimeters of back focus for most telescope systems including the Ascar FMA 180 that I'm gonna be using tonight. Now, in terms of physical setup of the Agma camera, they're currently selling it with this nice little filter holder. So, or it's actually a filter set. It comes with a UV-IR cut filter and then it comes with this little metal adapter to hold the filter. This leaves you 16.5 millimeters of space to get to that desired 55 millimeters. So you can either buy just a metal spacer or maybe you want to use some kind of other accessory like a rotator or an off-access guider or something like that. So we just put the filter inside the filter holder. We screw that onto the camera and then we either use another spacer or something like that to attach to the telescope. We need to use power and it does include an AC adapter if that's the way you want to go or you can get your own power cable to attach to a battery. Then the next thing with the Agma is the software setup and the main thing here is that you need to install the driver for whatever kind of computer operating system you use. So I'm gonna be doing this on Windows. So I got the Ascom driver and Ascom is a shared platform that's used by many different software packages. So you just need the Ascom platform, then you get the Ascom driver for all your different devices and that's if you're on Windows. So I did that and then I used my software of choice which is Sequence Generator Pro but there are many options for control software including astrophotography tool, Nina and the list goes on and on. I'll show this basic sort of interface of you set up a sequence of exposures. So you tell it how many light frames you wanna take at what exposure value if you're using a filter wheel you can automatically change the filters using this kind of software and so forth. And the nice thing about this software to get into it is that it can automate a lot of the process. Like it can bring in plate solving, it can send commands to the guiding software to dither and so forth. And I should say you can use this software with Canon cameras as well but it's mandatory to use this kind of software with a dedicated astronomy camera. So it does sort of force you to learn something new but learning that control software can actually really accelerate your astrophotography. The downside for me is you can get it so automated that it sort of takes away some of the hands-on nature of astrophotography. Okay and now onto my favorite part actually looking at images and comparing the two cameras that way. To start here are some tech details about how I captured these images. I took 12 five-minute exposures with each camera. I did this near the zenith so hopefully there weren't too many differences in terms of the atmosphere. The moon was new and the main reason I did that is just so I don't have to deal with gradients and the effect of moonlight changing things. So just to make it a little more fair and then I live in a pretty dark area. Portal three means like a rural sky but that shouldn't really affect anything too much because I was using this dual narrowband filter. Now something that will affect difference is the ambient temperature was pretty warm for New Hampshire. This was a July night. It was I think a high of close to 90 during the day and it didn't cool down too much at night when I was doing this. So it was about 78 degrees Fahrenheit or 24 degrees Celsius which is pretty warm for astrophotography. I know that some people probably do astrophotography and even warmer temperatures but for me that's a pretty warm night. Okay and of course this didn't affect the Agma camera because that was cooled down to negative 10 C but the Canon camera would be affected by warmer temperatures. Okay so here is the Canon result. Looks pretty nice just for an hour and there's the Agma result. And at first glance you know the main thing I see that's different is the Agma looks brighter and then also is a different shape and that's just due to the sensor size. So what I did was I registered these two together so that we could see them more clearly side by side like this. So let me just blink between them. This is the Canon and that is the Agma, the astro camera. And this is just a screen stretch but I think it's pretty evident that the astro camera came out a lot brighter because the background level is the same here but the nebulosity looks a lot brighter, right? And so what could account for this? I think there's a couple things. One is noise, right? So when you have more read noise and more thermal noise that's going to change how much signal is actually in the final stack. And so the Agma has more signal to noise. The signal to noise ratio is better compared to the Canon. The other thing is that the quantum efficiency I think is a lot better with the Agma camera. And so when you're doing narrow band work where you're starved for signal that better quantum efficiency can make a big difference like this. Now, this is not the end of the story. We're just looking at raw data here. We haven't done any real processing but I want to continue on with this just a little bit just to show you more of these differences when we're just using screen stretched fairly raw data here. So what I did was I took out the red channel which sort of represents the H-alpha side of the dual narrow band filter and the G channel which the green channel which represents the O3 side of the filter. And so here is the red channel, the HA response for the Canon. And here it is for the Agma. And you can see the Agma looks a lot cleaner. It's the contrast is a lot better. I can blink between these two. There's the Canon. There's the Agma astro camera. Okay. And now we can do the same thing for the green. So this is sort of like the O3 response. There's the Canon and there is the astro camera. And I can blink between the two. And one thing I found pretty interesting was the really noisy areas. So if we look at where the soap bubble should be, the soap bubble is a little feature near the Crescent Nebula that was found by an amateur named Dave Gerasovic out of San Diego not too long ago, maybe 15 years ago. There's just the faintest hint of the soap bubble in the astro camera, the Agma. But if I look at that same area in the Canon, I can just barely make it out but it's almost entirely lost in the noise, right? So this is a direct example of why signal to noise ratio matters and how a better sensor with less read noise and cooling and all that can actually make a difference because this is not impressive yet but maybe in five hours or 10 hours of data that would be enough to really bring out the soap bubble while with the Canon it might take 15, 20 hours. So you really do get sort of a benefit there in terms of the time you have to invest to bring out these dimmest features. Okay, next I'm gonna move over to Photoshop because I think this is gonna be interesting. I'll show you how I did the final processing with these two cameras and then we'll look at the final results of the processed data. And just to say what I did here is I stretched these two images, the red starless and the green starless and then I took the stars out of this picture and I brought those three files over to Photoshop and then I'll show you what I did over there. So here's the red starless stretched and I just applied a little bit of a curves adjustment just to make it a slightly darker and then I colorized it to red. If you've never seen this before this is just an adjustment layer. I just set it to colorize. I have the saturation set to 53, the hue set to zero and it makes it red. Now I screen blended the green channel on top of that. I again did another curves adjustment and set the color of that one to blue. Again, with a saturation set to 53. Then this picture is looking good in terms of color but it looks a little bit washed out. So I applied a curves adjustment to make it a lot more contrasty and then for my taste it was just like a little bit too maybe magenta. So I took out a little bit of the magenta with a selective color adjustment. And then that's it for the starless version of this image but I prefer images with stars so I then screen blended them back in and by screen blend I just mean I took this image that's the stars only and you can do that with star exterminator or star net and I changed the blending mode to screen to add them back on top. Okay, and that's all the processing I did. So stretching the red channel, the green channel, colorizing them and doing some a little bit of work with curves to get the contrast and color how I liked and then with selective color mostly to take out a little bit of the magenta and I find that helps just sort of really bring out where's the O3 signal and where's the HA signal? Okay, and then I did that exact same processing with the Canon data. So exact same. And what I found is that after processing you can still see that the Agama version is brighter but otherwise they look fairly similar as you'd expect if you're using the same filter, the same telescope, the same mount. And when you process the data as far as I did here which is probably a little bit too aggressive for just one hour of data, it's going to be fairly noisy. So let me just show you what I mean by that. When we zoom in, first I wanna show these side by side. There we go. Okay, let's zoom in. Okay, so you see all of this grainy noise and even though we know from looking at the more raw data that the Canon was a lot noisier than the Agama, the astro camera, when I look at them like this are all processed, the noise level actually seems pretty comparable. It doesn't seem that different. The main thing I see is just that the Agama one looks brighter and maybe just a little bit sharper but the noise actually looks pretty similar. And when we zoom back out, those two images look very similar. So in terms of sharing them on social media or something like a small screen, you're not gonna see a huge amount of difference. I think where you really are gonna start seeing difference is when you're going after those faintest objects like the soap bubble nebula that I showed you earlier, you might be able to bring it out in 10 hours with the astro camera and it might take 20 hours or more with the DSLR, just because it can very easily get lost in the noise. But in terms of these bigger structures, these things that are a bit brighter, you can see both cameras can serve you quite well. As mentioned at the beginning of the video, I've put together a quiz. If you're still a little bit unsure about which kind of camera you should get, this quiz should help. And it's really easy. All you have to do is just answer each question truthfully. And so I'm gonna go ahead and go through here and take it and then I'll show you how to interpret the results. Okay, so after you go through and answer each question and click submit, it's gonna bring you to this page. And then what you wanna do is just go ahead and click on this view score button down here. That's going to give you a score right here where it says total points. So you can see my score is 32. Now I just go back to this first tab and it says if your score is between 27 and 35, you should definitely get a modified DSLR. So there's my answer. And then I could just click on this link right here to bring me to a page with all the gear that I'd need to put together this kit. So that's it. Hopefully this is a lot of fun. That's what it's meant to be, is just for fun and just to see if it helps you make a final decision. You're now seeing the names of everyone who supports me in this channel through my Patreon campaign. The support on Patreon really means the world to me because it's how I was able to pursue Nebula Photos full-time and put together complex videos like the one that you just saw. And I think my Patreon community is very rewarding if you're into this stuff because we do a lot of fun things together like Zoom calls, monthly imaging challenges, and there's a bunch of private channels on my Discord server where there are people hanging out and talking about Ask Photography 24 hours a day. In addition to all that, you get direct messaging support with me. So if you have questions, you can ask and I'll get back to you usually within a day or two. So I think it's well worth checking out and it starts at just $1 per month to join. Hope you enjoyed this one. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver. Clear skies.