From: "Tim" <tjp314@pacbell.net>

Date: September 7, 2005 4:29:32 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: New DSO Images


I posted this, or thought I had, a few days ago, but it's not here...


Milton, were these taken with your flea camera cooled as you showed us you were going to 

experiment with earlier?


-Tim.


--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "Tim" <tjp314@p...> wrote:

Milton:


Wow, those look very promising!  I'm amazed at what the new cameras can do these 

days!  

I can't wait for my flea to show up at my door.  Alas, no indication it might come 

early...  ...yet, though Sean said that they had hired new people recently, so production 

might speed up a bit.


-Tim.



--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "Milton Aupperle" <milton@o...> wrote:

Hi folks;


I was on vacation (well in theory I was, I was sick with a flu for 10

of my 14 day "vacation") and managed to tak a few images with the Flea

camera and the MAK scope from a very Dark Sky area. I have posted

images of M1, M27, M31 Core, M31 and M57 in the DSO file area. Levels,

sharpening and saturation adjustments were done with a new 16 bit

(i.e. RGB48 bit image) module I'm working on in Astro IIDC 2.x.


It was lucky that Astro IIDC can guide, as the replacement RA drive /

hand controller I received from Orion was screwed up and tracked slow

(about 1 arc second for every 4 seconds) and can not be adjusted. So

without Astro IIDC constantly correcting I'd have gotten nothing

captured at all. Even doing Drift Polar Align was next to impossible

without it. The guiding was done using a unibrian mono camera with a

50 mm apertur 600 focal length telephoto scope and a second copy of

Astro IIDC, so two cameras were being utilized at the same time.


One thing I learned was that you really need to make sure you take a

good average for Dark Frames with DSO's, even if it means waiting a

while. I did for the M57 shot (which was taken while a 3/4 full moon

was up), but did not for the August 28/29 session and as a result, I

needed to work the levels a lot to remove some noise.


TTYL..


Milton Aupperle