The company which manufactures the astronomy cameras discussed here in this blog - The Imaging Source - has just released a blog for its industrial, medical and scientific image processing products (cameras, frame grabbers, converters, optics and software).

Read it online and subscribe today:
http://www.TheImagingSourceBlog.com

Below is a screenshot of the new industrial image processing blog:

The capture program for Linux is called ucview, which deploys the unicap library.

I am delighted to announce that unicap 0.2.22 has just been released.

It now ships with the following improvements:

• Better support for The Imaging Source USB 2.0 astronomy and industrial cameras
  (download the uvcvideo driver)
• Added and fixed some color conversion routines
• GTK+ apps can register their own color format conversion callback
• Some minor fixes in the unicapGTK library
• Support for recent uvcvideo drivers
• French translation (thanks to Kiki Novak!)
• Packages for Ubuntu Hardy

You can download the source code package from the unicap web site:
http://www.unicap-imaging.org/download.htm

Packages for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) are in the repositories:
http://www.unicap-imaging.org/using_repositories.htm

We have talked about using The Imaging Source astronomy cameras on Linux previously (here, here and here).

The capture program for Linux is called ucview, which deploys the unicap library.

I am delighted to announce to better support the Linux astronomy cameras community, a set of unicap forums have been launched:

• http://www.unicap-imaging.org/forums/

If you have any matter related to running The Imaging Source astronomy cameras on Linux with ucview and unicap, please do not hesitate to post your questions into the above forum.

The forum is maintained by the program’s chief developer, Arne Caspari.

This year I had the opportunity and the pleasure to attend the entire NEAIC meeting at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York. This two day conference offered astronomy buffs many great talks on beginner, intermediate, and advanced astro-imaging.

With the schedule packed with enthusiasts from Solar, Stellar, and Planetary imaging, I found it difficult to attend all of the wonderful talks. “The little DMK” seemed to be quite a hot topic in many of the presentations this year, as well as, the social discussions (and quarrels) that followed.

As a fairly new player on the astronomy imaging scene, The Imaging Source astronomy cameras did quite well taken to its paces by so very many imaging experts!

Six of our fine resellers from “The Americas” attended the event, three of which stayed throughout the weekend selling our products. OPT, Adirondak, and Woodland Hills all ran purchasing specials on The Imaging Source cameras for both NEAIC and for the subsequent NorthEast Astronomy Forum.

Here I am in the middle of the imaging mob with John and Jim from Adirondack Astronomy.

Of the most impressive presentations, below are a couple photos from a presentation by Robert Reeves, the author of Introduction to Webcam Astrophotography. In this talk, Mr. Reeves shows the audience why the DMK 41AF02.AS is his pick for high quality, low noise, and low cost astrophotography solutions:

If this is an indication of the coming year’s success for The Imaging Source cameras in the astronomy imaging market, I look forward to seeing all of our customers and dealers at this year’s RTMC in Big Bear!

Clear Skies

profjohn

Axel Canicio - the winner of the Astronomy Cameras Competition in March - has submitted a first light image, which he captured with his new DMK 21AU04.AS astronomy camera.

Below is a photo of M51, which he captured on April 26, 2008 (click to zoom);

According to Axel’s e-mail, the photo was captured using the following hardware and settings:

C11 + F/3.3 Meade reducer, Skywatcher EQ6 GOTO, Skywatcher ED80 for tracking.
Photo camera : DMK 21AU04.AS
Tracking camera : DMK 31AF03.AS
15 frames at 10 seconds, 20 frames at 30 seconds, 20 frames at 60 seconds, 25 frames at 120 seconds.

Axel is the chief programmer of the software Astrosnap and is currently testing the professional version of his application with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.

A great thanks goes out to Axel for this exceptional image!