Stefan Lammel of Uxbridge in the United Kingdom has today again demonstrated the spectacular results of the DMK 21AF04 FireWire camera.
His lunar image Wave of Rings appeared on Lunar Photo Of The Day (LPOD).
Stefan’s rig: 27-April-07 21:21UT. 7″ f8 Newtonian + 3x PowerMate + DMK 21AF04 + green filter; Registax v4, PSE 5, 1/34s (gain 650), 900/4000, MAP: 30-40x 64×64.
Dan Kaplan, a DMK user from Kensington, Maryland, has this to say about the family of FireWire cameras on our astronomy cameras web site:
Although I’ve had a DMK camera (DBK 31AF03.AS) for just a few months, I’ve been involved with planetary imaging for several years. I’ve been primarily using a ToUcam Pro webcam and have been impressed with the results, but decided to step up to a better camera to try to eke out that bit of additional detail.
Simply put, I was amazed at the results I could achieve with the DMK camera. It’s really in a different league from other cameras I’ve tried. [...] since getting the camera, my skies have been consistently medicore, with very few nights of even fairly steady seeing, and the transparency has been, well, lousy. So, I haven’t been using the DMK under ideal conditions, but, even so, I’ve gotten images much better than anything I could do in the past.[...]I am attaching three images. The first one, of Saturn, taken with a 7″ TMB apochromatic refractor, has the most detail of any Saturn image I’ve taken.
The second image of Saturn is taken with a 3.5″ Questar. The Questar has really sharp optics, but it’s still a 3.5″ scope, and conventional wisdom says that you’re just not going to get much detail. Well, the Saturn image is the best one I’ve ever seen using the 3.5 and looks much like images I’ve seen with other cameras using the Questar 7. And the moon picture is just as impressive.
All in all, it’s a pretty amazing camera at a very competitive price!
Based in Mansfield, MA, USA, Edward Roach has published a number of lunar images and in particular stunning details of numerous craters. The DMK 21AF04 is his camera of choice and a few of those images are linked below.
Bart Declercq has recently published a large number of Lunar photos that he captured with his DMK camera. Although, he does not specify which model he utilizes, each photo is quite stunning!
Pictures through C9.25 telescope and 2x Barlow
http://bartcentral.dommel.be/Astronomy/Moon/2007-01-25/
C9.25 - including extremely high resolution images
http://bartcentral.dommel.be/Astronomy/Moon/2007-02-03/
Mosaic of the waxing Moon (high resolution)
http://bartcentral.dommel.be/Astronomy/Moon/2007-02-21/slides/Moon_20070221.html
Diverse images of the Moon
http://bartcentral.dommel.be/Astronomy/Moon/2007-03-25/
http://bartcentral.dommel.be/Astronomy/Moon/2007-03-26/
http://bartcentral.dommel.be/Astronomy/Moon/2007-03-27/
Heiko Wilkens, the author of Lucam Recorder, has announced on the Yahoo! Groups DMKCCD-Cameras Mailing List that he will release a new version of Lucam Recorder that will support The Imaging Source DMK cameras later this year.
He writes:
I have already purchased 2 DMK cameras December last year for integration. Unfortunately, I was busy with other astronomical projects until this month.
Although Lucam Recorder was created to meet the special needs of advanced amateur astronomers, it is utilized by staff at NASA and ESA. Other users include world-wide universities, scientific institutes, and non-astronomical manufacturing companies as well.
Below, is a screenshot of the main application window:
