Joe Zawodny has again been very busy with his DMK 31AF03.AS. In a recent e-mail to The Imaging Source, Joe wrote:

I’ve been having a blast imaging the Moon recently. I love my DMK 31AF03.AS. It is so easy to use and the results are consistent and predictable. The low noise helps me capture those fleeting instants of good seeing and short-stack just the best-of-the-best images to produce wonderful images. I’ve managed to capture a few of the lunar features on my wish list. Have a look at these from around sunset on February 14, 2008.

He submitted the following images (click for originals):

Again, Joe, we can only congratulate you on these magnificent photos. Keep up the good work.

One of our more recently added German resellers, Intercon Spacetec, based in Augsburg, Germany, has just published the following advert in the German magazine Sterne und Weltraum.

There is a translation into English for our non-German speaking blog readers below.

Translated into English:

The Imaging Source CCD Cameras

The Imaging Source CCD cameras have been specifically designed for astronomy. They are as easy to use as a web camera, but offer a number of advantages over a web camera: uncompressed data stream, higher frame rate, longer exposure times and high quality, low noise electronics.

The monochrome CCD cameras are shipped without an IR cut filter. The models with a 640×480 resolution can capture up to 60 frame per second and are thus ideally suited to planetary astro-photography. The color cameras are available as RGB with an IR cut filter or as a Bayer camera without IR cut filter.

All cameras have a maximum exposure time of 60 minutes, ship with C and CS mounts (1.25″ adapter included) and are powered via the bus. Furthermore, a driver CD and IC Capture.AS is included. The software runs on Windows XP and Vista. The cameras are available with a USB 2.0 and FireWire connectors.

[A list of cameras with prices follows]

Intercon Spacetec’s web site offers a number of details product descriptions and photos of The Imaging Source astronomy cameras, in addition to some images captured with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.

We welcome, wholeheartedly, Intercon Spacetec to our global network of resellers.

Joe Zawodny, a DBK 31AF03.AS user for some time now, has recently emailed his Mars results to share with The Imaging Source community.

Joe writes:

I finally had a night of reasonable seeing. With the full Moon in the sky there was little I could image other than Mars. So, I spent a little over three and half hours taking AVI video clips of Mars every 15 minutes. During this time Mars will rotate a little more than 51 degrees. One of the reasons to display things this way is to convince viewers that the detail shown is real.

The imagery looses something in the conversion to an animated GIF. 256 colors just doesn’t cover the range of colors well. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be posting some of the individual frames later.

C-11 at ~f/20 (5700mm) with a DBK 31AF03.AS color webcam. Each frame is derived from a stack of the best 1000 out of 5000 frames. Exposure 1/19 sec, Gain 510, 15 fps

You can see the avi here:
http://flickr.com/photos/jmzawodny/2214693219/

Great work Joe! You should be proud!

profjohn

Didier Favre is a dedicated amateur astronomer, based in Brétigny-sur-Orge, France. On his excellent web site, Alcyone Astronomie, he presents a vast array of hardware that he uses to capture images of the night sky. Furthermore, the site offers beginners detailed information on getting started in astro-photography.

Didier is the founder of Solardatabase, which records information gathered by people observing the Sun through out the world and l’association d’astronomie Tycho Brahé, which was set up in 1992 in Annecy-le-Vieux, Haute-Savoie, France.

Below is a magnificent image of the sun with Didier captured with his DMK 31AF03.AS on February 10, 2008:

Click on the image to download the original.

A great thanks goes out to Didier for this enthusiasm and we welcome him to the astronomy cameras community.

I recently came across the following deep sky image image in an astronomy forum. It was captured by Axel Canicio in Alès, France. This is a first light image that he captured with his new astronomy camera DMK 31AF03.AS, which he purchased in the sales. The image is of the globular cluster M53 in the constellation Coma Berenices:

Click on the image to download the original.

A great thanks goes out to Axel for this enthusiasm and we welcome him to the astronomy cameras community.