After 20 years in the imaging field, The Imaging Source is pleased to introduce our line of FireWire cameras to the astronomy community.

Many professional and amateur astronomers alike are raving about the quality of our cameras and the robust software that is shipped free with the product! Here’s a few brief quotes from the astronomy community.

Michael Fulbright reports in a candid review of the DMK 21AF04 on the Cloudy Nights Website:

It gave me some of the best images I’ve taken yet.

Christopher Go writes

[...] other than being the Camera that discovered the Reddening of Oval BA now called Red Spot Jr or the Little Red Spot. To be honest, without this camera, I would not have discovered Red Spot Jr!

Levi Mize from Camarillo CA says:

[...] the DMK purchased from very helpful, knowledgeable, and friendly [...] (the sales team) returned e-mails and phone calls promptly. I will definitely be doing more business with them in the future.

And finally, George Tarsoudis states:

The Imaging Source’s DMK camera is the best digital FireWire camera for Lunar and Planetary photography!

With the free robust IC Capture.AS software, the rugged industrial manufacturing, and the helpful sales and support team, The Imaging Source will define The Next Generation of Astronomy Cameras. Watch for more news, more pictures, and much more attention in the coming months on www.AstronomyCamerasBlog.com, www.AstronomyCameras.com, and in upcoming issues of Sky and Telescope magazine.

Wes Higgins has had one of his moon images posted on lpod.org. The image was captured with The Imaging Source DMK 21F04 monochrome camera.

Chuck Wood at Lunar Photo of the Day writes:

Rayed craters are rayless at low illuminations, but this view of Kepler is intermediate between low and high so that both the topography and rays are visible. Kepler itself is a small (32 km diameter) and young complex crater.Its walls have collapsed and slid toward the floor, piling up both amorphous mounds and discontinous terraces. At the center of a small flat floor are a handful of central peaks. Kepler’s ray system differs from Tycho and some other craters in that at Kepler the rays emerge from a large bright area - perhaps 3-4 times the diameter of the crater; this seems to be an area completely covered by rays. The rubbly terrain that Kepler and its close-in rays cover is ejecta from the Imbrium basin-forming impact.

Equipment: Starmaster 18″ Newtonian + DMK 21F04 camera, 30 fps, stack of 660 frames from 2100.

The series of The Imaging Source FireWire cameras without AS in their product code has been designed for industrial, scientific and medical applications. Consequently, these cameras are extremely robust electronically and in terms of physical resistance to exterior stress.

The Imaging Source industrial cameras are often built into the interior of machines in production lines, where they run for years and years. Should a camera in such a situation fail, the whole production line would come to a grinding halt.

A typical example of this kind of application is in a brewery, in which thousands of freshly filled beer bottles race past our cameras on a conveyor belt. Each and every bottle is digitally photographed and the resulting image is analyzed in almost real-time to establish whether the bottle is sufficiently full. Should it not be, the bottle is rejected.

These kinds of applications demand cameras that are completely stable; cameras that just work and do not fail.

The Imaging Source series of astronomy cameras - those with AS in their product code - are identical in almost every respect to their industrial brothers. The astronomy cameras are designed to the same level of robustness (they have the same casing as their brothers). Electronically, the only difference is the exposure time.

The astronomy cameras can be exposed for up to sixty minutes, where as the industrial cameras have a maximum exposure time of thirty seconds.

To see this, take a look for yourself at the specification tables:

DMK 21AF04.AS and DMK 21AF04

Essentially, whenever you wish to use The Imaging Source cameras for astrophotography, we highly recommend that you deploy the AS series. After all, they have been built especially for astronomers.

Over at Astronomy Magazine, George Tarsoudis has published some first light images of the Moon that he captured with The Imaging Source DMK 21BF04 FireWire camera.

He writes:

Theophilus - Cyrillus - Catharina, 14 Aug. 2006
My first light with my new camera DMK 21BF04 with barlow 2.5X, telescope LXD-75 SC 8″.

Crater Clavus, 14 Aug. 2006
About 1179 frames at 30fps with DMK21BF04, 00:28:09 UT, telescope LXD-75 8″ SC, barlow 2.5X Powermate.

Vallis Alpes, 14 Aug. 2006
With DMK 21BF04 camera and barlow 2.5X, Telescope LXD-75 8″ SC, 516 frames from the AVI file with 959 frames.

Rima Hyginus, 14 Aug. 2006
With DMK 21BF04 camera and barlow 2.5X, Telescope LXD-75 8″ SC, about 1276 frames.

Furthermore, we have published several photos that George Tarsoudis has captured in our official Astronomy Cameras Sample Images archive.

Jaicoa, a junior member of the Extreme Astronomy forum has published an interesting image of Saturn that he captured with his The Imaging Source DMK 21AF04 monochrome FireWire camera. He attributes the success of the image to the exceptionally good weather conditions.