Dan Kaplan, an astronomy customer in Kensington, Maryland and an avid DMK user since January of this year, has produced numerous images with the mono, the color and the raw Bayer cameras available on astronomycameras.com. Dan sent a couple of Saturn shots to me a few days ago that I thought all would enjoy.

Additionally, he has great things to say about our cameras!

Although I've had a DMK camera (and the DBK 31 AF03.AS) for just a few months, I've been involved with planetary imaging for several years. I've been primarily using a ToUcam Pro webcam and have been impressed with the results, but decided to step up to a better camera to try to eek out a bit of additional detail. Simply put, I was amazed at the results I could achieve with the DMK camera. It's really in a different league from other cameras I've tried. Since getting the camera, my skies have been consistently mediocre, with very few nights of even fairly steady seeing, and the transparency has been, well, lousy. So, I haven't been using the DMK under ideal conditions, but, even so, I've gotten images much better than anything I could do in the past. Not only with the ToUcam, but other cameras as well, some costing a good deal more than the DMK.

I have attached three images. The first one, of Saturn, taken with a 7″ TMB apochromatic refractor, has the most detail of any Saturn image I've taken.

The second picture of Saturn is taken with a 3.5″ Questar. The Questar has really sharp optics, but it's still a 3.5″ scope. Although conventional wisdom says that you're just not going to get much detail, to my surprise, the Saturn image is the sharpest one I've seen yet using the 3.5 and looks much like images using the Questar 7.

And the moon picture [...] just as impressive.

Dan Kaplan, Kensington, MD