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.

Here is yet another interesting astronomy application using The Imaging Source cameras sent to us by the infamous Rainer Ehlert in Mexico.

Please click on the following frame to download the movie file of ca. 50MB:

Accompanying this file, Rainer writes:

Using a DFK 41AF02.AS as cameras together with an Fisheye lens from Sunex 185° FOV 1.55mm focal length and f2.0, I built a little All-Sky camera. [...]

[Shown here is] approximately 10 hours of recording images every 15 seconds with an exposure time of 13.7 seconds [using the DFK 41AF02.AS]. This All-Sky camera thematic [astronomy application] is getting more and more interesting to many amateur astronomers as they want to check what is happening with their sky during long periods.

Special thanks to Mike Shreick who inspired me to making one of this All-Sky cameras.

I hope you like [...]

regards,

Rainer

Thanks Amigo and keep up all the great work!

profjohn

Laurent Langelez is becoming a regular to this blog. Last week, he sent my esteemed colleague Aurélie Le Fort an e-mail, announcing that some of his images of the International Space Station (ISS), together with a longer article had been published.

The article appeared in the May 2008 issue of Astronomie Magazine (number 101) and is entitled A la poursuite de la Station spatiale (On the heals of ISS)

The journalist, Carine Soupet, presents some images of ISS, which were captured by Laurent using The Imaging Source astronomy camera DMK 31AU03.AS. Laurent purchased the camera from our French reseller MecAstronic.

On the reseller’s web site, you can see some more images which Laurent captured, but this time, of planes. Once he had mastered the art of capturing planes did he move onto to more difficult targets, such as ISS.

Below is an example plane capture:

The article in Astronomie Magazine, an image of which is displayed below, covers two pages and includes a detailed discussion of the hardware used by Laurent and his wife, including all applicable camera, telescope and software settings. The images were captured on February 04, 2008, while ISS was passing by.

If you would like to learn more, go to your local newsstand and ask for the current issue of Astronomie Magazine and look for the following pages:

A great thanks goes out to Laurent for letting us know about this great article. We are very much looking forward to receiving more images from your, the next time ISS is passing by!