ABSTRACT
The chance of success from a night’s imaging improves with a little planning. Before committing to hours of exposure and precious clear skies, it pays to consider a few preliminaries, the most basic of which is frame size. The combination of telescope and camera should give the object the right emphasis within the frame. There are simple calculations that give the field of view in arc minutes, which you can compare with the object’s size listed in a planetarium program. I have two refractors and two field flatteners, which in combination give four different fields of view (FOV). High quality imaging takes time and the next thing is to check if there is sufficient opportunity to deliver the required imaging time. There are several considerations: the object’s declination, the season, the brightness of the object over the background illumination, sky quality and in part the resolution of the optical / imaging system.
