This is post 2 of 4 is from a Mac user in Sweden that joined The Imaging Source community this past summer. He originally purchased the DMK 41AU02.AS specifically for planetary imaging but was quite surprised when the 1/2 chip based CCD camera surpassed all of his expectation. This will be the first of four blogs highlighting Mr Rosen’s fine work. He writes:

Hello Profjohn,

I recently bought a DMK 41AF02.AS to use mainly on planets and the moon.  I use a Mac so I also bought AstroIIDC for the capture. As I live in central Stockholm, Sweden there are obvious limitations for DSO-photography due to light pollution, and I had reached the
limit with my Canon Eos SLR.

[...]This is my latest shot at the Trapezium region in M42. It started out as a project to photograph just the trapezium stars and separate the elusive e and f-components (upper right).

Base exposures 0.5 - 1 sec at prime focus of my Intes M703. At the same time I exposed the nebulosities at up to 40 sec with the L filter, then composited the result  in Photoshop with the color information from a picture taken 1,5 years ago with my Canon EOS. I first removed the overexposed stars of the core then added the 6 trapezium stars from my separate shot (the inserted color image to the left).

The bakground is a wider field photographed at prime focus of a William Optics FLT 110 (TEC optics) apochromatic reflector. The picture on the lower right is just a blown upp part of the core with the naming of the 6 trapezium stars.

Best regards
Peter Rosén

Joe Zawodny, a long time customer of The Imaging Source, has recently put the new stacking software, AVI Stack, through its paces. In this BLOG, you can find a very nice lunar image along with a link to Joe’s review. Joe writes:

Here is an eight panel mosaic of the NW limb of the Moon. Seeing degraded rapidly and thin clouds wreaked havoc with the exposures. I had a tough time matching the seams despite taking all of the exposures with the same settings. This newly reprocessed image simply must be seen at its full 2409×2712 pixel resolution. North is straight up.

My first AVI was during the best seeing and was centered on Aristachus. There is a hint of the fine rille running along the bottom of Vallis Schröteri, aka ‘the snake’. There are numerous rilles and volcanic mounds can be seen throughout this part of the Moon.

Update: Reprocessed with AVI Stack using between 1465 and 1799 alingment points in each of the 8 frames comprising the mosaic. The result is a significant increase in resolution.

Telescope: C-11 @ f/10
Camera: DMK31 AF03.AS
Red filter
G: 350 E: 1/54 sec
AVI Stack best 300 out of 1300
Wavelets in RegiStax and RLD in ImagesPlus
Mosaic alignment and exposure adjustments in PhotoShop

The following article is from a Mac user in Sweden that joined The Imaging Source community this past summer. He originally purchased the DMK 41AU02.AS specifically for planetary imaging but was quite surprised when the 1/2 chip based CCD camera surpassed all of his expectation. This will be the first of four blogs highlighting Mr Rosen’s fine work. He writes:

Hello Profjohn,

I recently bought a DMK 41AF02.AS to use mainly on planets and the moon. I use a Mac so I also bought AstroIIDC for the capture. As I live in central Stockholm, Sweden there are obvious limitations for DSO-photography due to light pollution, and I had reached the limit with my Canon Eos SLR.

The camera arrived at the begining of this summer so the sky was turning bright all night long. Stockholm is at 59° 20′ N. On the day of summer solstice and with the sun less than 7° under the northern horizon I decided to give M57 a “blind” try as it was ideally positioned on the meridian with bright Vega nearby but absolutely invisible to the eye. There were obvious problems of doing a decent polar alignment, centering the ring nebula and reaching proper focus, all this in strong wind, so time was passing by very quickly. I finally managed to get 70 shots of 20 seconds through the luminance filter at prime focus of my Intes M703 Maksutov.

I realized that this camera would allow me to photograph deeper into space than previously possible from my location. Here is a LRGB shot of M57 taken on the 29th of september 2008,  22 min lum and a total of 23 min RGB using a Meade f/6,3 reducer on the Intes M703 Mak.

Best regards
Peter Rosén

Guten Tag! to all of our astro-imagers from my colleagues at The Imaging Source Headquarters! I have been in Europe visiting and collaborating for the past two weeks in Bremen with my German Colleagues. As most of you know, The Imaging Source, had its beginning 20 years ago in this Northern City and has continued production here to retain the DMK’s high quality.

With that in mind, I thought it would appropriate to highlight this BLOG article with a image from Peter Schluck, an astrophotagrapher located approximately 200 KM South of The Imaging Source, Bremen. In this image, Peter show a fine example of the power of image stacking using astronomy cameras from The Imaging Source.

Hi ProfJohn,

To show the imaging capabilities of a large 17inch Newton and the DMK 21AU04.AS from The Imaging source. Here is an image showing what can be done with rather bad raw images to get a usable result. I got 300 single images of 1 second integration time and stacked them together. With a bit of image processing, we get a nice pix of M57!

Regards
Peter

Aspach ,Germany

Webastro is the largest astronomy forum in France. We are glad to see our camera DMK31AU03.AS reviewed there by Marc Patry, an astro-photography amateur from southern France.

He wrote the review after testing the camera DMK 31AU03.AS for 6 weeks. Marc gave not only several pieces of advice and techniques on how to use this camera and its software IC Capture.AS, but he also included an extraordinary lunar mosaic image in his report:

Visit http://www.webastro.net/index.php?wapedia=182 for the complete review.

Many thanks to Marc!