Dan LLewellyn of Telescope Atlanta, the first Astronomy Camera reseller in the US for The Imaging Source, has sent quite a nice shot of the Holmes Comet. A normally docile comet discovered over 100 years ago, suddenly became nearly one million times brighter last week, possibly over just a few hours.

The comet brightened from 17, only visible through a good telescope, to magnitude 3, becoming visible with the unaided eye. It is easily seen with the naked eye as it has enlarged to the size of Jupiter and is now in the constellation Perseus.

Look northeast a bit after sunset, find Cassiopeia, then drop down and to the east just a bit! Here’s a map if you have trouble.

Dan captured this image Friday with a DMK 31AF03.AS from his home (not Holme) Atlanta.

Keep watching and if you get an image with a camera from The Imaging Source, please send it for our blog!

As we recently mentioned, Tony Gondola wrote a great test report for the September / October edition of the Australian magazine Sky and Space. He put The Imaging Source DMK 21AF04 FireWire camera throughout its paces in his detailed article, entitled [The] Imaging Source’s Box of Tricks.

Whereas, we are certain that most amateur astronomers read Sky and Space in Australia, there are many countries in which the magazine is not available. For example, here in Germany, where I am based. For this reason, we are absolutely delighted to announce that you can download the article in its entirety as a high quality PDF completely free of charge.

Click on the image below to download:

UPDATED November 13, 2007: On the third page of his review, Tony writes “The DMK cameras all come with a free copy of Ulead’s lossless compression codec.” We are not sure how he comes to this conclusion, but this is not true. Our astronomy cameras do not ship with the Ulead compression codec.

We contacted Tony Gondola, the author of the recent DMK 21AF04 review in Sky and Space, about which we recently blogged, to thank him for the great article. He wrote back saying:

It was a pleasure to do it as you have an excellent product.

And also added a link to his web site, which contains a number of great Lunar images that he has captured with DMK 21AF04.

Below are three of the best ones. His web site contains many more.

Full Disk - 12.3 Days:

Tyco:

Plato - Vallis Alpes:

The Focal Point, the magazine of the Atlanta Astronomy Club, has published a brief article about the experiences of Rich Jakiel, while capturing an image of Mars, using one of The Imaging Source’s astronomy cameras.

The Focal Point writes:

A Stooge’s View of Mars

Rich Jakiel took this photo on September 4th at 9:36 UT at the WiseGuy Observatory in Douglasville, GA.. The stats on Mars at that time were as follows: Diameter = 8.28″, Central Meridian = 314.5o, Phase = 0.86. The telescope used was a 12″ Meade LX200 at f/20 with a DMK 21AF04.AS camera with RGB (IR=L), 3000 frames each, 4000 for IR.

The seeing was poor to fair (a 4 out of 10), the transparency was a 5 out of 10.

Rich wrote, “Here is my first attempt at LRGB imaging of Mars. The disk is still quite small (8.3″) and markedly gibbous. The dust is now settling enough for the albedo features to become more pronounced.

This image uses stacks of ~3000 frames for RGB and 4000 frames in the near IR (>742 nm) for the luminance. I used my 12-inch LX200 at f/20, while the camera is the monochrome DMK 21AF04.AS.

The seeing was rather poor for most of the run, and after a couple miserable attempts at f/30, I dropped it down to f/20 (2x Barlow), and then later resampled the image at 150%. Image processing was done with Registax 4, Photoshop, IRIS and AIP4WIN 2.0.”

Source: The Focal Point, Vol. 20 No. 5.

Many astronomy customers of The Imaging Source have recently asked if it is possible to power their DMK 21AF04.AS without the use of the AC power supply, or “Mainy” as we call them. Because the DMK 21AF04.AS and its siblings must be an extremely versatile family of FireWire cameras, we have built them such that they can be powered with a supply voltage between 8 and 30 dc volts while drawing less than 200mA.

Field application can be a breeze with the use of a 12 volt automobile battery, a 12 volt motorcycle battery, or generic power pack. Radio Shack sells an inexpensive “AA” battery pack and the 5mm plug adapter that will fit nicely into the PJ2 cable.

Personally, I much prefer the “Dynamo” from Orion so that I’m certain I can start my truck after a night in the wild! Besides that, the Dynamo is rechargeable, useful in numerous circumstances, and doubles as a great flashlight! The battery packs do have their advantages including a price under $5.00 (plus the 8 “AA” batteries) and they easily fit into your jeans pocket whereas the Dynamo and car batteries weigh A LOT!You can count on at least 2 hours continuous use of your DMK 21AF04.AS from The Imaging Source with 8 fresh “AA” batteries or about 2 years with the Dynamo… the decision is yours! In the end, the power supply is a personal decision that must be weighed against the circumstance of your stargazing situation. The key is… The Imaging Source DMK 21AF04.AS (and its siblings) will function in all situations listed above!