Pierre-Alain Arnaud is an amateur astronomer, who lives in a small village in Alpes de Haute-Provence (France).

Last weekend, he proudly submitted two images on the Sun, which he captured with his FireWire camera DMK 31AF03, manufactured by The Imaging Source.

The first clearly shows an active area on the Sun:

And the second, a prominence:

The images were captured on March 29, 2008 at 15:30, using the following hardware and software setup:

PST Coronado filters, DMK 31AF03 in ROI mode. Average prominence. The AVI was written in RGB 24, post-processed in Iris and finalized in Photoshop.

We welcome Pierre-Alain to the astronomy cameras community and look forward to receiving more of his magnificent images.

Dietmar Hager, a well-known amateur astronomer, who is based in Linz (Austria), submitted his first planetary images this week. The image is of Vallis Alpes on the Moon. It was captured with the astronomy camera DMK 21AF04.AS, mounted on a TMB Apo 9″.

Click on the following image to download the original version:

Accompanying his image, Dietmar wrote:

It has been quite a while since the 9″ TMB Apo has seen ’solar system-light’. I have purchased a planetary equipment enabling me to utilize good conditions with a bright moon up in the sky, where deep-sky imaging makes no sense.

Also, it is quite fun to play with this equipment and pursue this activity in planetary imaging. It is completely different! Another fascinating world. Seeing was quite good last night, but transparency was not. Actually it was a disaster.

The lunar image you see suffers from bad transparency, as I could only run the fast DMK 21AF04 camera at only 15 fps.

Dietmar is the owner of the private observatory Stargazer and has published a number of excellent images on his web site. We highly recommend that you go and take a look.

A great thanks goes out to Dietmar for his contribution to The Imaging Source astronomy cameras community.

We recently received an e-mail from Stephen Roche, an amateur astronomer based in Waterford (Ireland).

He submitted an image of Saturn and its moons, which he captured on April 08, 2008 at 22:44. For the capture, he deployed the DMK 31AF03.AS astronomy camera, manufactured by The Imaging Source.

Click on the following to download the original:

Stephen commented the image with the following words:

Saturn and it Moons imaged on Tuesday the 8th April, 2008 at 22.44pm, using a DMK 31AF03.AS and a CGE 11 inch SCT. I captured an Exposure for the Moons first and then overlaid the LRGB images of Saturn itself to achieve the result.

Furthermore, he let us know that he runs a great little web site, which contains a number of astronomy photos.

The Imaging Source astronomy cameras have arrived in Italy! And that, more than a year ago!

The Italian magazine Coelum ASTRONOMIA sent us a copy of their April 2007 issue (#105), in which the FireWire astronomy camera DMK 31AF03.AS was tested. The result is a five page article, which discusses the camera in detail.

The text was written by Odi Plinio Camaiti.

The journalist examines the practical aspects of the camera, looks at the advantages of monochrome cameras and discusses in detail the shipped camera control software IC Capture.AS. For his article, he has captured images of the Moon and Saturn, in addition to some deep sky objects.

He concludes the article in a positive light (paraphrased from Italian):

The DMK 31AF03.AS and IC Capture.AS are a powerful and flexible combination, which by far surpass the limits of the typical webcam.

The text is illustrated by a number of images that you can admire, even if you do not speak Italian. For our Italian-speaking customers, feel free to read the full article, which can be downloaded below. Just click on the screenshot.

A great thank you goes out to Coelum ASTRONOMIA for publishing this in depth review.

On March 18, 2008 SCIENCE@NASA reported on The Vanishing Rings of Saturn:

Saturn: jewel of the solar system, taker of breaths, ringed beauty. Even veteran astronomers can’t help but gasp when they see her through a small telescope.

Red Alert: Saturn’s rings are vanishing.

Around the world, amateur astronomers have noticed the change; Saturn’s wide open rings are rapidly narrowing into a thin line. Efrain Morales Rivera sends these pictures taken through a backyard telescope in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.

The article was accompanied by the following image, which was captured using a DMK 21AF04 FireWire camera:

Last week, I was in contact with Efrain Morales, who sent me the remainder of the image (click for full size version):

His hardware was as follows:

Meade LX2000GPS, 10″ OTA. Celestron CGE, DMK 21AF04 CCD camera, TeleVue 3x Barlows, Baarder UV/IR fiter, Astronomik LRGB filter set.

We congratulate Efrain Morales for having his work published by SCIENCE@NASA and thank him for sharing his images with the rest of the astronomy cameras community.