Congratulations on the purchase of your Next Generation FireWire Astronomy Camera. The “Out of the Box” series of blogs will insure a quick and easy installation of your new equipment to get you outside stargazing asap! Our engineers and programmers at The Imaging Source attempt to predict any and all possible stumbling blocks during installation so as to insure a quick and painless (or brainless) procedure.

All of The Imaging Source Astronomy Cameras ship standard with IC Capture.AS, an application specifically written for extended exposures used in Astrophotography. Upon receipt of the camera, most installations can be completed in less than five minutes.

Step One is to plug your new FireWire camera into your computer using either a 6Pin to 6Pin or a 6Pin to 4Pin FireWire cable.

Step Two is installing the software including (1) the camera driver and (2) the IC Capture.AS program. When you insert the CD into your computer, a dialog box should pop up and will look like the screen shot below (Note: If the autorun.exe does not start up the CD right away, simply double click on My Computer and then again on the IC Capture.AS icon in the Devices column).

You should now be able to launch IC Capture.AS and begin imaging!

Frank Brandl is eager to post the preliminary results from his new DMK 21AF04.AS astronomy camera. His magnificent photo shows Saturn, captured with an IR/UV cut filter.

He is planning to use his camera together with a filter wheel (Atik) and Astronomik LRGB filter set or with the ToUCam for RGB (in this configuration the DMK 21AF04.AS will produce the luminance layer).

The DMK 21AF04.AS is connected to his laptop via FireWire (IEEE 1394), which allows a maximum of 60 fps of uncompressed data (depending on the integration time).

The video stream for this image had 8 fps.

Frank Brandl has a number of other images in his gallery:
http://www.frankbrandl.com/htm/frame_gallery.htm

Astro IIDC is an application for astronomy that has been developed to simplify the process of capturing images from a FireWire camera connected to a Mac.

It has been well tested with The Imaging Source cameras. Amongst others, the manufacturer of Astro IIDC cites the following FireWire cameras as being compatible:

• The Imaging Source DMK 21F04
• The Imaging Source DMM 21F04
• The Imaging Source DMM 21F04-ML

• The Imaging Source DFK 21F04
• The Imaging Source DFM 21F04
• The Imaging Source DFM 21F04-ML

• The Imaging Source DBK 21F04
• The Imaging Source DBM 21F04
• The Imaging Source DBM 21F04-ML

UPDATED August 08, 2007: Since writing this blog post, the manufacturer now supports many more The Imaging Source cameras, including all from the astronomy range. Please see the section System Requirements, Compatibility and Limitations of the manufacturers’ web site for details.

Using the software, you can set gamma, saturation, red gain, brightness, black point and exposure and capture single frames or entire image sequences.

Below are a couple of screenshots of the main application window and the camera settings dialog:

Learn more about Astro IIDC, please take a look at the manufacturer’s web site.