gallery 6

These were shot with the Stellacam on 11/28/02 using the 10" f 5.6 dob on the 20" scopes equatorial platform. it really is better to over mount a scope right? As my laptop left with the family, these were shot to high 8 tape and then frames were grabbed using a ADS Technologies USB Instant video device. I grabbed with Astrovideo rather then the USB devices software. This was "ok" but Astrovideo "locks up" unless the tape is kept running. All were processed with Astrovideo. The pictures were touched up in GIMP either with histogram or curves feature after cropping (these seem to work better after cropping).

Jeff Ball, Dave Tolley and I met at the DCMO on 11/23/02 and were trying to image with the C14. They sky was transparent but the seeing was unsteady which hindered efforts at imaging. But the drive was working well so we tried the Stellacam and the Meade Electronic EP on Saturn and these are the results of our "tag team" effort.

On 11/24/02 between 2:30-3:30PM I shot the sun using the 90mm ETX with a Thousand Oaks white light filter and with the NearStar with a Meade Electronic Eyepiece through an Infrared filter. These are each about 4-8 frames "averaged" with Astrostack.

I used the 10" f5.6 on the 20" dual axis platform to image with the StellaCam and f6 Steve Mogg focal reducer. StellaCam settings were: ELC, Sense up 128, max gain. I acquired as fits images every 2 seconds with Astrovideo and did dark subtraction of a dark frame that was the average of 10 2sec dark frames. For some reason I could not get 640x480 out of the driver that XP/Astrovideo recognizes, it told me 320 or 356 but not 640! I was limited in my efforts as I could not see the Veil, this was probably a bad sign. In my experiance, the Stellacam can image what you see in the EP but not what you can't. Bummer.