Bolton Astronomical Society

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...

Is the smudge bottom centre part of the camera or your lens Ross ?

dean_kos wrote:Is the smudge bottom centre part of the camera or your lens Ross ?

It's probably just a mark or reflection on the double-glazed window, as it looks to be trailed along the same line that the mount was tracking.

Later last night (after the rain cleared) I managed to try my 200mm lens, aiming at the Double Cluster:I've had a look at the high-resolution original, and there's no sign of that smudge on this image (which was aimed through a different part of the window, and at a different angle).

By the way, this colour camera does seem to bring out the red stars quite nicely.

Well done Ross, you've saved us all a fortune - by adding double glazing into the image train you've showed me how I can turn my humble doublet into a quad apo

After several weeks of waiting for a gap in the weather, last night I finally got a chance to try our Infinity camera on a comet (my only other chance had been stymied by problems with the software).

Taking advantage of the clear sky in the early evening, I had my mount set up and aligned by 5:30pm. I used my StarWave 80ED refractor, initially with a focal-reducer fitted to the camera, but this gave too much distortion around the edges of the image, so I went back to the 'scope's "native" f/6.9 focal-ratio.

The new "version 1.2 Beta" of the software gave no trouble at all, and I aligned and focused on Kochab and then slewed to comet C/2014 S2 PanSTARRS in Draco, and managed to collect 23x 90-sec images before the clouds started to roll in.

The great feature of the Infinity software is that it aligns and stacks the images "live" on the screen, so I could see the image building up step by step, and then (after fiddling with the thresholds and colour-balance) I could save this result:This was the first time I'd used this software, so it's probably capable of getting an even better result, with practice?

As the clouds had set in for the evening, I packed away and went indoors to process the same data-set in IRIS - this time using offset & dark-frame calibrations (and omitting the frame with the airplane-trail from the stack). It took over an hour to get to this result:

On Christmas Eve there was another clear spell in the early evening, which gave me the opportunity to try our Infinity camera on my C8 SCT.
My first test was with the focal reducer taking it down from f/10 to f/4.2: this gave a bright wide image, but at the cost of severe vignetting: Next I tried a focal-ratio of f/5.6, aiming at comet C/2013 X1 PanSTARRS high up in Pegasus. As the Infinity software live-stacked the images on the background star-field, the comet's relative movement soon became apparent: I left the system running like this whilst I went indoors for some dinner, popping out to check on it from time to time. All was well for 40 minutes, but then (unbeknown to me) my EQ mount's drive stopped tracking (when my target had passed so far West of the meridian that it had reached its safety-limit).
But this situtation was not apparent from the Infinity program display, which was still blithely showing its stack of the first 40 images. It was only when I spotted that the frame-count was not incrementing from 40 that I realised that something was amiss, and on switching to a live display from the camera, found stars trailing across the frame.
But after doing a quick meridian-flip, I was able to carry on imaging for another 20 minutes before the clouds came over.

Then later in the evening I processed both sets of images (from either side of the meridian) in IRIS, and combined them into a single image registered on the comet:Actually this is the first time I've tracked any target through a meridian-flip.