Silvia Kowollik, one of the winners of our astronomy cameras competition sent in the following deep sky image. It was captured with the camera that she won.

Accompanying her e-mail, she added the following (translated from German):

On Tuesday evening, I was able to capture my first deep sky object using a color filter, from my balcony. The image is of the Orion Nebula (Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) and was captured with a DMK 21AF04.AS and Astronomik color filter. I own a small Fraunhofer refractor telescope (100/500) and have reduced the focal length to 287mm, using a Shapley lens and 5mm spacing ring. I was thus able to image the entire nebula.

I am very happy with the camera. I would never have thought that using such a short exposure time it would have been possible to get so much detailed information onto the CCD.

A great thanks go out to Silvia for this spectacular image.

Mars is slowly getting further and further away from the Earth and will not be as visible as it currently is for the next nine years.

Last week, Thierry Lépine sent me the following image of Mars, which he captured with his DMK 31AF03.AS at l’Observatoire de l’Institut d’Optique Graduate School in Saint-Etienne, France on February 09, 2008. The red planet was only 11″ in diameter at the time of capture. The resulting image was stacked in RegiStax, using 900 singular frames.

Click on the following image for the original:

Thierry commentates the image with:

Our DMK 31[AF03.AS] camera is very impressive. Plenty of details are clearly visible: The polar cap, Olympus Mons et Tharsis, Solis Lacus.

A great thanks goes out to Thierry for sending his latest image of the red planet.

Maison de l’astronomie, one of our French resellers - based in Paris - has just published the following brief article in their news bulletin:

Translated into English, this means:

They’ve done it again! The Imaging Source has yet again brought out new cameras, but this time with a new connector. The new cameras ship with a USB 2.0 connector, hence there is no need to use a specialized power supply (as was the case with the FireWire models). This makes the new cameras particularly suited to deployment in the field. The cameras ship with three types of CCDs: 640×480, 1024×768 and 1280×960.

If you are ever in Paris, we recommend going round to Maison de l’astronomie to take a look at all the wonderful products they have in stock!

In the March 2008 issue (#34) of the British magazine BBC Sky At Night, the DMK 21AF04.AS has been awarded the Best Monochrome CCD Camera title in the magazine’s Best Buys section (page 99).

In the Best Buys section, the editorial team picks the top products from the ones that they have recently reviewed. The Imaging Source astronomy cameras were reviewed in issue #31 of the magazine.

It is a great honor to have been awarded this title! Thank you BBC Sky At Night magazine! If you have not already done so, go out and buy the magazine today!

Mick Hyde contacted us recently to submit the following image. In his e-mail to The Imaging Source, he wrote:

Here’s a picture of Saturn that I produced last night using a DMK 21AF04.AS camera, Celestron 9.25 telescope, 3x TV Barlow. Processed in RegiStax and PSP. RGB, 2000 frames per channel.

Below is the image he sent:

You can see more of Mick’s work in his well maintained blog, which contains a plenty of very good astrophotography:
http://astromick.blogspot.com