This year I had the opportunity and the pleasure to attend the entire NEAIC meeting at Rockland Community College in Suffern, New York. This two day conference offered astronomy buffs many great talks on beginner, intermediate, and advanced astro-imaging.

With the schedule packed with enthusiasts from Solar, Stellar, and Planetary imaging, I found it difficult to attend all of the wonderful talks. “The little DMK” seemed to be quite a hot topic in many of the presentations this year, as well as, the social discussions (and quarrels) that followed.

As a fairly new player on the astronomy imaging scene, The Imaging Source astronomy cameras did quite well taken to its paces by so very many imaging experts!

Six of our fine resellers from “The Americas” attended the event, three of which stayed throughout the weekend selling our products. OPT, Adirondak, and Woodland Hills all ran purchasing specials on The Imaging Source cameras for both NEAIC and for the subsequent NorthEast Astronomy Forum.

Here I am in the middle of the imaging mob with John and Jim from Adirondack Astronomy.

Of the most impressive presentations, below are a couple photos from a presentation by Robert Reeves, the author of Introduction to Webcam Astrophotography. In this talk, Mr. Reeves shows the audience why the DMK 41AF02.AS is his pick for high quality, low noise, and low cost astrophotography solutions:

If this is an indication of the coming year’s success for The Imaging Source cameras in the astronomy imaging market, I look forward to seeing all of our customers and dealers at this year’s RTMC in Big Bear!

Clear Skies

profjohn

Axel Canicio - the winner of the Astronomy Cameras Competition in March - has submitted a first light image, which he captured with his new DMK 21AU04.AS astronomy camera.

Below is a photo of M51, which he captured on April 26, 2008 (click to zoom);

According to Axel’s e-mail, the photo was captured using the following hardware and settings:

C11 + F/3.3 Meade reducer, Skywatcher EQ6 GOTO, Skywatcher ED80 for tracking.
Photo camera : DMK 21AU04.AS
Tracking camera : DMK 31AF03.AS
15 frames at 10 seconds, 20 frames at 30 seconds, 20 frames at 60 seconds, 25 frames at 120 seconds.

Axel is the chief programmer of the software Astrosnap and is currently testing the professional version of his application with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.

A great thanks goes out to Axel for this exceptional image!

Last week, we received the following image of the Apennine Mountains on the Moon, submitted by Thomas Jäger, an amateur astronomer, based in Germany. It is a first light image, which Thomas captured, using his new USB 2.0 astronomy camera DBK 31AU03.AS on April 13. 2008:

Accompanying his image, Thomas wrote (translated from German):

I am very happy with the camera. 30 frame per second are enough to get the image really sharp. The images (video) have very low noise and no compression artifacts whatsoever. A great compliment for the software [IC Capture.AS] which works perfectly. I post-processed the individual frames using Gioto.

A great thanks go out to Thomas for this wonderful contribution and especially for his enthusiasm about The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.