Last year, Sean Walker wrote an outstanding test report for Sky And Telescope about the DMK 21AF04.AS astronomy camera; this year he has just sent us a spectacular animation of Mars.

In this e-mail, he writes:

I thought you may enjoy this rotating globe of Mars I created with a DMK 21AF04.AS and a 12.5″ Newtonian reflector. [...] Allow a minute for the entire animation to load, as it’s quite big, but worth the wait.

Below is the animation:

As Sean notes, the animation is rather sizable, hence, it will take a while to load, depending on your Internet connection.

Greatest thanks go out to Sean! If any other blog readers have similar animations, which they would like to share with the astronomy cameras community, please do not hesitate to send them to us!

Astrofiles.net is a very well respected French language web site, created by two enthusiastic astronomers in 2004.

The site offers amateur astronomers and any other visitor with an interest in astronomy a number of rubrics on space travel, astronomy and cosmology.

Those of you who regularly visit Astrofiles.net will have noticed a link to this blog in the section partner sites (“partenaire”).

Take a look for yourself: www.astrofiles.net.

This week, I came across a remarkable web site. It seems to be one of the most popular web sites in France for astronomy. Their goal is to offer free hosting to people interested in astronomy and topics related to astronomy.

As of January 17, 2008 visitors to Astrosurf.com can see one of our new French language banners:

The banner links to the French version of our astronomy cameras competition web site. Go over and take a look at the competition web site: you can win prizes - currently a USB 2.0 astronomy camera.

Also, go and take a look at Astrosurf.com - they have a great deal to offer!

We have written about Alan Friedman’s spectacular work with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras before in this blog. Again, with his latest published image, he illustrates the kind of extremely professional results, which are possible with our cameras.

Over at LPOD, the following image has been uploaded. Using a DMK 41BF02 FireWire camera, Alan stitched two images together, each with 200 frames (from a stream of 900).

Click one following image to download the full resolution:

Chuck Wood, the site’s moderator, commentates the photo:

Ho hum, another exquisite image of Sinus Iridum. I want to use it for LPOD so I’ll have to find something new to say… Wait, what is that thin line near top right between the west end of the Straight Range and the isolated peak? A little Photoshop unsharp mask and voila - see the dark inset at bottom right! There is definitely a squiggly interrupted line with short shadows cast on the left and slightly bright edges on the right, indicating a depression. It looks like a very closely spaced crater chain, previously unknown, I think. To check, the brighter insert is from Lunar Orbiter IV (from the seamless mosaic of Map-A-Planet). The upper part of the chain, near shore, is definitely a secondary crater chain cluster. But the bottom part doesn’t show as chain on the Orbiter image, in fact there is hardly anything there at all at that magnification. But blow up the Orbiter image and there is a very narrow sinuous rille! It starts near the eastern side of the Prom. Laplace, wanders pass the isolated peak, crosses the mare ridge, and abruptly turns south and disappears. Comparison to the nearby 11 km wide Laplace D crater shows that this sinuous rille is about 500 m wide. Not bad for a 10″ Mak in Buffalo! More about the rille tomorrow.

Last week, we received an e-mail from the Germany-based celebrated astro-photographer, Sebastian Voltmer who runs a delightful little web site over at www.astrophoto.de.

Although the web site is in German, our international audience should not have too many problems understanding what it is all about. The web site is full of sample images, videos, publications and contains information about current astronomy events.

Sebastian sent in a great composite photo of Mars, which contains images that he captured on three different days:

Accompanying his image, Sebastian wrote:

Die DFK 21AU04.AS ist ausgezeichnet! Anbei ein Mars-Trio…

Translated into English, this means:

The DFK 21AU04.AS is exceptional! Attached a Mars trio…

Great thanks go out to Sebastian for this work with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.