Astronomy Now, the organizer of AstroFest 2008, put on a fantastic event, which was visited by many thousand people. They cannot be praised enough. Our special thanks go out to Keith Cooper and Wendy Collins from Astronomy Now for receiving us.

Aurélie and I really enjoyed looking at the massive range of telescopes, books and astronomy cameras, in addition to talking to many of the guests. The event was a great opportunity to met up with a number of people, from the press and our resellers.

You can read more blog entries about AstroFest 2008, using Google’s blog search or over at Technorati.

Below are a few impressions of the event:

Aurélie and I are now on the road from our European Headquarters in Bremen, Germany, headed towards London, UK, to the European AstroFest in the Kensington Conference and Events Centre. With a bit of luck, we should be there in the early afternoon.

Our timetable is filled with interesting meet-ups to present and discuss our astronomy cameras.

We look forward to meeting you all. See you this afternoon

In November last year, Graeme Coates won a DMK 41AF02.AS astronomy camera, by taking part in the BBC Sky at Night magazine Hotshots 2007 competition.

His winning photo is below:

Today, Graeme has just launched his own blog, in which he writes:

This picture was chosen as Anacortes Telescope & Wild Bird picture of the day on 6th Nov 2006.

Additionally, it was chosen as Sky at Night Magazine Hotshots Picture of the Month, Feb 2007 and subsequently it was chosen as Sky at Night Magazine Hotshot of the Year, 2007. (Sky at Night Magazine). As part of the Sky at Night Hotshots competition, I won a 5x Astro Engineering barlow lens for the photo of the month, and a DMK 41AF02.AS camera from The Imaging Source.

I really recommend that you go and take a look at this blog. Graeme is a very talented astro-photographer and no doubt will be posting some more spectacular images to blog in the near future (using, of course, his DMK 41AF02.AS!)

Below is a screenshot, upon which you can click to go to his new blog:

In the January 2008 issue of the UK magazine The Astronomer, Nick James has published an interesting article, which looks at the DFK 31AF03.AS.

The Astronomer is a magazine which is aimed at advanced amateur astronomers. It publishes all observations of astronomical interest as soon as possible after they are made. The magazine has been around since 1964 and is published once per month. Their web site offers back issues, dating back to 1977 and a very comprehensive electronic circulars service, which is geared to keeping subscribers members up to date.

In his article, James writes:

The camera is well made with a solid metal case and it is supplied with a 1 1/4″ noisepiece ready to attach to the telescope.

The software supplied is pretty good and it installed without any problems on the fairly low-end (2002 vintage) Pentium 4 PC in my observatory. This runs Windows XP, SP2 and the camera was immediately recognized and configured. [...] I operated the camera via a 4m cable connected to the observatory PC and then controlled the setup from indoors via a remote desktop.

The camera can [...] be used in long exposure mode and the dark noise is impressively low and consistent from frame to frame. I would expect however that it’s main application will be as a high frame-rate planetary imaging camera.

[...] I have used a humble Toucam to get some good results [but the DFK 31AF03.AS] beats that by a long way.

You can download the full article, by clicking on the following screenshot.

As ever, our thanks go out to The Astronomer and in particular, Nick James for publishing this well-written and researched article.

I have recently come across the following really interesting astro-photography site:

http://www.astrosurf.com/bayart

Jean-Christophe Bayart is the site’s creator.

His web site presents a number of spectacular images, many of which were captured with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras. For example, there are several archives of planetary and lunar images.

Below is an example image of Mars, which was captured with a DMK 21AF04:

Click on the image to download the original.

In addition, Jean-Christopher has published several articles, detailing the various methods of capturing and post-processing images. These guides are aimed at amateur astronomers, who are just starting out.