AviStack is a freeware to register, stack and process astronomical movies and image sequences. Primarily developed to process lunar images, AviStack has also been used on processing solar and planetary photos. The software is fully compatible with The Imaging Source astronomy cameras.

There is a Group about AviStack on Yahoo. In that group, users and experts discuss the their experiences and exchange tech info on this tool. For instance the software’s developer Michael Theusner put out a note on 05.July recruiting people to test and report bugs of the Alpha version of the up-coming AviStack 2.0, and the response has been phenomenal. The testing had closed on 09.July. Michael has been crazy busy with it afterwards.

Maybe you can retrieve some valuable info from that group if you are using this tool or planning to do so. The group’s URL: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/AviStack/.

Have fun and clear skies!

Allsky Probe is a astronomical system developed by French amateur astronomer Cyril Cavadore, who is also the author of the software Prism.

The idea of the system is to image the complete sky with a single shot, regardless of day or night, so that the quality of the sky can be measured in a real-time manner. This system is also able to record fast phenomena happening in the sky, such as meteors and fireballs, and to measure scientific magnitude per sec².

Cyril utilizes the DMK/DFK 41 astronomy cameras (USB&GigE interfaces) as the imaging tool of the system, because according to him

I need the largest possible sensor for this application and to enjoy the field of Fisheye.

Here is a color photo taken by Allsky Probe on 22.05, 2010.

It shows a moonless sky in a place not affected by light pollution, with brightness at zenith sky about magnitude 21 per arcsec square. Stars of magnitude 6 are visible.

The same sky on the same night, but 20 minutes earlier, with a monochrome TIS camera:

The sensitivity is better with the expense of color information (a slight tilt adjustment problem is visible, it has been  corrected). The stars of magnitude 7 are detected using 60s exposure.

Details about his project can be found at http://www.alcor-system.com/fr/AllSkyCamera/index_en.html.

Congrats to Cyril! Keep up the good work!

The following pictures were submitted by Gari Arrillaga. He took them with the DBK 31AU03.AS astronomy camera. The Jupiter photo was his first attempt with the camera on this giant planet. Details of these shots can be found in the captions.

Thank you Gari! Clear sky!

This image provides a detailed view of Sunspot 1084 on July 3, 2010. The author is French astrophotographer Thierry Barbier. He uses a DMK 41AU02.AS astronomy camera.

His email is translated as below:

A movie of 300 images at the focus of an achromatic refractor SW 120×1000, ERF filter 90mm f/10, PST and 2x Barlow.

Processing in Registax for typesetting, Iris thresholds, and wavelet colorization.

The image has been reduced to keep only the interesting parts. Note the fine filaments in the lower left.

You will find more astronomy pictures Thierry captured with TIS camera at

http://t_bar.perso.neuf.fr/astronomie/site/pages/astro_indexpag.html.

Many thanks to Thierry!

Dr. Bernhard Christ has been using DMK 31AF03.AS astronomy camera for two and half years. His previous works include photos of ISS, the Moon, and the Solar/Lunar Eclipse. The following Sun picture are still fresh. He photographed them on last Friday.

Two of them are grayscale inversed. And all of them are zoomed to adapt to our blog layout. But you can open the original ones by clicking on the pictures below.

Grayscale Inversed. Original Photo 2568x2761

Grayscale Inversed. Original Photo 2632x2070

Here is what he wrote in the email:

on friday morning (2010-07-09, 7:42 CEST), before sun spot NOAA 11087 became visible next day, I could catch a small sun flare with my DMK31AF03. The flare showed much more brightness than the surrounding sun area. It vanished some minutes after I took the video.

In the pics below one can see the flare close to the prominence (North-East is in corner up-right). First pic (dmk31 10-07-10 07-42-57 b PSE positiv) is the H alpha-pic taken with a 90/1000-PST applying ocular projection and the DMK31AF03. Next (dmk31 10-07-10 07-42-57 b PSE invers) is the negativ version of this pic. And the third pic (dmk31 10-07-10 07-42-57 a invers tis) shows NAOO 11087 on saturday also as a negativ version.

Vielen Dank für Ihre schönen Bilder Herr Dr. Christ! Wir würden uns über weitere Astronomie-Fotos von Ihnen sehr freuen.