Oldfield So, over in Hong Kong, has published an interesting article about debayering techniques for the DBK and DFK series of astronomy cameras.

He discusses the following three techniques:

Case A: Debayer’ing is done at hardware level, and so the data coming from the camera is already in full color. [...]

Case B: By choosing Y800 for the device codec, the hardware sends original data which is not yet debayer’ed, that saves some Firewire bandwidth, and then the debayer’ing is done at software level by IC capture. [...]

Case C: We have chosen Y800 for the device as above, so the data coming from the camera is still not yet debayer’ed, and therefore, it uses less Firewire bandwidth. And Debayer’ing is also disabled in IC Capture, meaning that Debayer’ing is not done on-the-fly as well, and so it requires less CPU cycle.

He has published a screenshot for each technique, one of which that illustrates the third technique, is below:

You can read the full article, in Oldfield’s blog.

A great thanks goes out to Oldfield for sharing this information with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras community.

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

I speak to hundreds of folks from The Imaging Source community each week and am always amazed at the number of new and exciting applications in which our cameras are implemented worldwide.

From astronomy to zoology, many applications are unique and quite fascinating.

Here is a couple stunning pictures taken with a DBK 21AF04.AS by a gentleman from NASA .

You may know that green plants are highly reflective in infrared light. I was playing around with IR-pass and IR-block filters on my DBK 21AF04.AS one day and was struck at just how strong this effect is on one of my plants. I’m attaching an image showing what I’m talking about. I figured you may want a demo of how your DBK color cameras are sensitive to IR light.

Rus Belikov

P.S. The sharp rise in infrared reflectance of green plants is known as the “red edge” and is one of spectral biomarkers in searching for life beyond the solar system.

Below is the image, which Rus submitted:

Thanks Rus! Keeps up the good work.

profjohn

Happy birthday to the Astronomy Cameras Blog!

We started this blog exactly one year ago today with a post about the March 2007 lunar eclipse, captured by Dominique Dierick:

Since then, the astronomy cameras community has gone from strength to strength. We receive more images, which our customers have captured using our astronomy cameras that we can possibly post here in the blog.

All of us at The Imaging Source are very thankful for this fantastic support and deployment of our cameras.

Since the release of the English language, the following French and Simplified Chinese version have also been published. Their aim is to build the community in French and Chinese speaking parts of the world. They are maintained by by colleagues Aurélie Le Fort and Xiao Sun respectively:

• Blog “caméras d’astronomie”

• 天文相机博客

Thanks again go out to all our readers for the great support and interest in The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.

Following his first light image of the Moon, André Débackère has again sent in more of his work. This time, it is a series of monochrome images that have been combined into one RGB image. The images of Saturn were captured with his DMK 21AU04.AS astronomy camera on March 13, 2008.

In his e-mail to us, André discusses the technical details of the image (translated from French):

30 fps, 1/30s. Each AVI, 4 minutes. HUFFYUV codec. Post acquisition processing in RegiStax. Quality 90%, wavelet level 1. Image orientation and RGB in Iris.

A big thank you from all at The Imaging Source go out to André. We appreciate your enthusiasm for our astronomy cameras and for sharing your work with the community.