From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: April 26, 2005 11:49:13 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Still in market for firewire webcam

Hi Tim;

On 26-Apr-05, at 11:10 AM, Tim wrote:

Well, I lost the bid on that iBot yesterday. Had to go to the hardware store for a plumbing

part for the house when the final minutes arrove. ;o)

So, I'm going to keep looking. In case I can afford one, Milton, can you tell me which

firewire webcam can take exposures longer than 1 second with your software? Can the

unibrain fire-i? (there's one on ebay at the moment).

Nope. None of the inexpensive cameras can do more than 1 second.

The cheapest on the market is the one that Alan uses - the DMK 21BF04 monochrome can do up to 30 second exposures and they are $590USD. But that's all moot anyhow as unless your scope if perfectly equatorially aligned, your drive works perfectly with no problems / PEC or your guiding it, it's not going work well for capturing DSO's anyhow.

The DSO's image I put up were manually guided using 2 copies of Astro IIDC, a Unibrain mono camera attached to a 600 mm telephoto lens as guider and the Flea FireWire camera on my MAK 127 mm scope with a MOOG focal reducer (focal length 450 mm). I then sat at the laptop and kept a faint guide star locked onto a particular point using the RA hand controller in one copy of Astro IIDC, while the main scope was capturing with another copy. Very tedious and one reason I'm trying to get RA (+/- DEC) control guiding in Astro IIDC 2.0.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com