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

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!

Disclaimer: This text is part of a five part series, which was originally published in the UK magazine Astronomy Now. The text is copyright Pole Star Publications Ltd, the publisher of the magazine and the images are copyright Nick Howes, the astro-photographer. Text and images have been reproduced here with kind permission of Astronomy Now and Nick Howes respectively.

The Imaging Source have delivered cameras and software that offer the serious Solar System imager a product which will deliver outstanding results for years to come.

If they came up with more memorable names for the products, I am sure they would do even better.

The webcam is dead, long live The Imaging Source!

And that brings to an end, this Astronomy Now review about The Imaging Source astronomy cameras. You can download the PDF version of the article, by clicking on the following screenshot:

Again, a great thanks goes out to Nick Howes and the editor of the magazine, Keith Cooper, for allowing us to publish this article here.

Disclaimer: This text is part of a five part series, which was originally published in the UK magazine Astronomy Now. The text is copyright Pole Star Publications Ltd, the publisher of the magazine and the images are copyright Nick Howes, the astro-photographer. Text and images have been reproduced here with kind permission of Astronomy Now and Nick Howes respectively.

A clear histogram view, which is a really useful aid in determining the optimal input levels for the camera when imaging brighter objects such as the Moon or Sun, and the full control over gain, gamma and other familiar settings using simple to understand and well laid out slider controls, will enable anyone upgrading from a ToUcam to quickly get to grips with this software in a matter of hours.

Another brilliant feature is the ROI (Region of interest) function, which allows you to crop the object being imaged (for example a planet), and avoid recording a whole lot of empty space.

In use, the wide spectral response of the Sony CCDs, peaking at around 510 nanometres, combined with their high sensitivity, turns both models into superb planetary cameras, and at this price point (£295 and £660 respectively) they simply have no rivals.

With careful use of dark frames and a good time to cool down, they are not bad deep sky cameras either. The mono ICX098BL, a chip I am familiar with from my own modified ToUcam, makes it perfect for imaging narrowband subjects such as the Sun in both hydrogen-alpha and Calcium-K light, two areas that interest me personally very much but now, at 60 frames per second, the resultant image quality I was able to achieve was noticeably better than anything I had obtained with the ToUcam.

In summary, both cameras are outstanding performers.

The DMK 21AU04.AS’s price point putting it well within reach of any amateur, and even the larger DMK 41AU02.AS still provides a price/performance ratio that is hard to beat.

My one and only gripe with it, and this has been a gripe with many astronomical cameras, is the relatively short length of the supplied USB 2.0 cable. Many imagers will simply find it too short for practical use, but I am aware that extending the cable length much more could introduce problems with signal drop out because of the limits in the USB specification. This is however easily rectified by getting a new cable from your nearest PC supplier, or integrating a powered hub to increase the overall length.

Disclaimer: This text is part of a five part series, which was originally published in the UK magazine Astronomy Now. The text is copyright Pole Star Publications Ltd, the publisher of the magazine and the images are copyright Nick Howes, the astro-photographer. Text and images have been reproduced here with kind permission of Astronomy Now and Nick Howes respectively.

The CD installs drivers (The Imaging Source supply drivers for Windows XP, Windows Vista (fully supported) and Apple Mac OSX, so no imagers are left out in the cold), that are supported by a wide range of popular applications such as K3CCD, Registax and PHD Guiding (both cameras, through their high sensitivity, will make excellent autoguiders as well), along with a really superb and fully featured imaging package known as IC Capture.AS.

The feeling that this is a package that has been crafted with quality at the forefront of the design continues when you launch IC Capture.AS, which is available also as a free trial version download on The Imaging Source website.

At launch, the application allows you to select the camera that you have connected, and then presents you with a wealth of control over your chosen device. A highly intuitive menu structure, which can even automatically configure all of the controls supported by your camera model, makes the configuration of the camera seem like child’s play.

Comprehensive and yet still simple to follow, it has you arming the camera to record video with frame rates ranging from a low 3.75 to 60 frames per second for the DMK 21AU04.AS, and 3.75 to 15 frames per second for the DMK 41AU02.AS.

The image capture can be either uncompressed, or a range of compression video codecs. The video stream output modes are supported in applications like Registax version 4. To maintain the absolute highest quality, most people will opt for either the uncompressed mode, or The Imaging Source’s preferred lossless codec, which is referenced in the quick start guide, though be aware that at 60 frames per second you will need a good, fast hard disk drive and plenty of space, as it will fill up quickly.

My relatively old Pentium 4 Hewlett Packard laptop coped perfectly well at all frame rates with almost no examples of any frame drop-out. The clever thing in this application is not only can you record video, but you can also pause and then resume the incoming video stream, which is perfect for when clouds go by, or the seeing becomes too poor for a while.