Successful First Light with James

Blogged by John Berryman on March 17, 2008 and tagged with Community, Sample Images, Moon.

As all of you know, one of the most exhilarating activities for astronomy buffs is receiving, unpacking, and prepping new equipment for "first light". The results can be brutal with so very many uncontrollable variables. But sometimes, the Weather Gods are smiling, Windows does what it is told, and everything in the Universe is good!

Hi [...]

I finally managed to get out with my new DMK 21AU04.AS and try my hand at some Lunar imaging with the new camera.

First thing I noticed was the Resolution which seems far superior than my trusted Phillps webcam I guess this is down to the Raw output and better CCD chip secondly, I noticed the frame rate which was caused a second WOW at the laptop screen I really felt like I was in orbit across the Moon when slewing from crater to crater.

After some time just looking at the screen and showing my family some Luna highlights I went about imaging. Using the software was a breeze simple yet all the features needed to adjust exposure/gain etc etc.

Here is a stitched image from the resulting images captured with the DMK 21AU04.AS which was attached to my LX90 and a 2x Barlow. Each image was a stack of 2000 frames which were stacked in Registax 4.

Roll on more clear skies.

James

Below is the image to which he is referring:

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