From: Mark Gaffney <markgaffney@mac.com>

Date: September 15, 2008 1:37:54 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] M57 on a full moon

Hi Milton, Sorry to be showing my ignorance again but what exactly is an EXHAD camera. I gather they have increased magnification for seeing down several magnitudes of star type. I remember that you mentioned that this sort of Flea 2 camera is available for an increased price. I priced the 648x 488 pixel colour Flea 2 & nearly even bought one before deciding to go with the larger scope whilst funds were available. They want $100 USD for postage out here on top of the $795 USD price tag which is well over $1000 AUD! I`ll have to either save or wait for more credit on my other card! You must be very pleased with the resolution on your new one. I`ve also been wondering about the wisdom of buying a B/W camera although I have no experience with processing these images. Mark.

On 16/09/2008, at 4:27 AM, Milton Aupperle wrote:

Hi Folks;

I was trying to set up PEC for my HEQ5 mount last night as turbulence

was pretty low. It's the first time I have tried this, and it didn't

work out very well (I screwed up a few times)- so I'll hopefully re-do

it again tonight.

I was using the EXHAD GrassHopper camera without any filters at all,

shooting at Prime focus (2,000 mm F/10) on the C8. So before I packed

it in for the night, I decided to do a quick unguided alignment test

on M57.

I put Astro IIDC in binned 4x4 mode, set the gains at around 30% and

then took 200 five second exposures of M57. I then selected 78 frames

for stacking and aligning to create this image.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/DSO/M57_20080914_MJA.jpg

I had high thin cloud which the full moon lit up and even with 5

second exposures the sky background was 10,000 out of 65,535. I am

very impressed with the sensitivity of this mono EXHAD camera.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle

------------------------------------

Yahoo! Groups Links