Stefan Lammel of Uxbridge in the United Kingdom has recently had one of his spectacular images of the moon published on LPOD Lunar Photo Of The Day. The image was captured using The Imaging Source DMK 21AF04 monochrome camera. In addition, to the published image, Stefan has several galleries online, containing a number of moon images, some of which were captured with his trusty DMK 21AF04.

The DMK 21AF04 monochrome camera was developed for industrial machine vision, medical and scientific imaging applications. Although it may be used for astrophotography, the astronomy camera DMK 21AF04.AS (the DMK 21AF04’s brother) is better suited, as its exposure time is 1/10,000 seconds to 60 minutes.

The DMK 21AF04.AS uses a monochrome progressive scan 1/4 inch CCD of type ICX098BL from Sony® and offers a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. Even at long exposure times, its noise is minimal.

Craterlet for OS X is designed to give Mac users a simple application with which to capture images from DCAM compatible cameras, such as our range of astronomy cameras.

The application allows planetary and lunar images to be streamed to the hard disk in BMP, JPEG, PNG and TIFF formats.

Although still in an early stage of development, the application has been tested with the astronomy camera DMK 31AF03.AS and firewire cameras from other manufacturers.

Below is a screenshot of the Windows version of the software.

Stark Labs, the authors of Craterlet, welcome assistance users can provide in testing. They would be delighted, if beta testers would contact them with bug reports, comments and constructive criticism. Furthermore, there is a Yahoo! Group to offer community support.

Craterlet OS X is freeware and requires OS X 10.4 in order to run.

Learn more about the software and download the pre-release version at:
http://www.stark-labs.com/prerelease.html

Mario Weigand from Offenbach am Main in Germany has published a stunning image of the moon, using The Imaging Source DMK 21BF04 FireWire camera.

His kit: Celestron C11 + Baader FFC + DMK 21BF04 FireWire camera + color information from Canon EOS 300D.

Here is the full text of his blog post:
http://www.lpod.org/?p=765

And the breathtaking high resolution image:
http://www.lpod.org/coppermine/displayimage.php?pid=574&fullsize=1

Cloudy Nights has recently published a product review of DMK 21AF04 astronomy camera. The author of the review is based 45 miles north of Los Angeles, CA, USA, a few miles from the ocean.

The reviewee seems pleased with the camera, writing a favorable text. He sets up the camera and software without any problems. Everything worked for him out of the box. He particularly notes that the customer service at The Imaging Source is competent, friendly and timely.

You can read the review in its entirety and see some of the sample images that have been published at:

http://www.cloudynights.com/item.php?item_id=1440

Michael Fulbright reports on his activities with The Imaging Source DMK 21F04 on several occasions.

Generally, he likes the high frame rate of the camera and concludes that it has given him some of the best images that he has ever captured:

It gave me some of the best images I’ve taken yet. I’ll need some better seeing in order to judge if its worth the extra money over the Toucam.

He has published a number of sample images that he has acquired with the camera:

http://msfastro.net/AstroAlbum2/moon_09242004_CLAVIUS/
http://msfastro.net/AstroAlbum2/Cleomedes_05062004_A/
http://msfastro.net/AstroAlbum2/Vallis_Alpes_C_04282004/
http://msfastro.net/AstroAlbum2/jup_seq_04282004/