To Infinity - and beyond?
Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 12:13 pm
I'm pleased to announce that the Society has just purchased one of the latest Atik Infinity colour CCD cameras:
http://www.atik-cameras.com/news/introd ... -infinity/
This device has novel features which will make it particularly useful at our star-parties, school visits and other "outreach" events: as well as having a particularly sensitive sensor, its software does "live-stacking", so the image builds up on the screen in real-time. This will allow the view from any 'scope (or camera-lens) to be shared with any number of observers, either from a laptop beside the telescope, a projector in a nearby meeting-room, or even web-cast!
And its ability to show colour from some of the "faint grey fuzzy blob" deep-sky objects (and comets!) will add to the wow-factor too.
I seized the first opportunity to star-test this camera during the gaps between the clouds (and rain-shower!) last night, but as I could only run it from my Win7 desktop computer, I was limited to using it from indoors, looking through a double-glazed window! Through my NE-facing window I could just see Andromeda rising above the trees, so thought that M31 and its companion galaxies would make a good target.
I first used 4x4 binning mode to locate the target, then 2x2 mode for focusing (the large on-screen display of the FHWM metric did help with this), and finally switched to full-resolution colour to capture the image: I wanted to see how successful the software was at stacking a set of images which suffered from the tracking errors and field-rotation from this unconventional set-up of an alt-azimuth mount. It did extremely well, even coping with a 10-minute interval when I had to stop the captures as the clouds came over. You can see that the alignment and stacking of all the images has been effective, as the edges of the image show the effects of the drift and field-rotation (and a single green "hot-pixel" can be seen tracking across the high-resolution original).
I'm now sorting out a focal-reducer and adaptors to allow the camera to fit onto various 'scopes, and meanwhile Carl and Bill are installing the Atik software onto a couple of laptops, so that we can set it up outdoors.
This new system should be in action in time for our visit to the Sacred Heart Primary School next month...
http://www.atik-cameras.com/news/introd ... -infinity/
This device has novel features which will make it particularly useful at our star-parties, school visits and other "outreach" events: as well as having a particularly sensitive sensor, its software does "live-stacking", so the image builds up on the screen in real-time. This will allow the view from any 'scope (or camera-lens) to be shared with any number of observers, either from a laptop beside the telescope, a projector in a nearby meeting-room, or even web-cast!

I seized the first opportunity to star-test this camera during the gaps between the clouds (and rain-shower!) last night, but as I could only run it from my Win7 desktop computer, I was limited to using it from indoors, looking through a double-glazed window! Through my NE-facing window I could just see Andromeda rising above the trees, so thought that M31 and its companion galaxies would make a good target.
I first used 4x4 binning mode to locate the target, then 2x2 mode for focusing (the large on-screen display of the FHWM metric did help with this), and finally switched to full-resolution colour to capture the image: I wanted to see how successful the software was at stacking a set of images which suffered from the tracking errors and field-rotation from this unconventional set-up of an alt-azimuth mount. It did extremely well, even coping with a 10-minute interval when I had to stop the captures as the clouds came over. You can see that the alignment and stacking of all the images has been effective, as the edges of the image show the effects of the drift and field-rotation (and a single green "hot-pixel" can be seen tracking across the high-resolution original).
I'm now sorting out a focal-reducer and adaptors to allow the camera to fit onto various 'scopes, and meanwhile Carl and Bill are installing the Atik software onto a couple of laptops, so that we can set it up outdoors.
