[sac-forum] Re: video astronomy info

I have no experience with video cameras, other than web cams. The idea of taking hundreds or thousands of short exposures and then stacking the best was a revolutionary idea that produced remarkable planetary and lunar images.
With the introduction of the Meade DSI series and the AutoStar Suite software things got upped a couple of notches. While the DSI series cannot take images at the rate of a video camera, they can take multiple short exposures (down to a micro second) for stacking/combining.
What is really remarkable is the ability to automatically reject bad images and only stack ones that meet an acceptable criteria. You can also draw one or two (for de-rotating with an Alt Az mount) tracking boxes so you can align the images perfectly. What this means is you can set up, start taking images and even with a poorly align mount, come back in 30 minutes or an hour and have an amazing image waiting for you. While the documentation for the AutoStar Suite is much less than desired, the software is really amazing and extremely powerful considering it is included with equipment. The recent DSI and DSI pro price reductions made this technology available for a around $100. 

Jeff

At 21:18 -0700 09/10/2007, Dan Gruber wrote:
Hello, everyone,
Bill McDonald, president of the Prescott club, joined us at Cherry last weekend with his Mallincam color video camera. Many of us took a look at the results (essentially real-time color images on a 13" TV monitor) and were impressed. Here's some additional info from Bill: 

--
Jeff Hopkins
HPO SOFT
Counting Photons
http://www.hposoft.com/Astro/astro.html
Hopkins Phoenix Observatory
7812 West Clayton Drive
Phoenix, Arizona 85033-2439 U.S.A.
(623)849-5889
(623) 247-1190 (Fax)
www.hposoft.com

Other related posts: