CCD imaging

[BillW]

Hi,

I tried out a CCD camera (an ATIK with a 2/3 in chip) with a 12mm cctv lens on it the other night.

Interesting results, used it to have a look at Chi Cygnus which is very bright at the moment. (Using coloured filters you can see that Chi Cyg is a VERY red star.)

Unlike triggered video observing this generates mountains of images! However it has higher resolution for spectroscopy. Today marks the astro year end for me as at my latitude the sun never gets out of astronomical twilight now. Something to experiment with when the Persieds roll around next time....

cheers,
Bill.

[leolion]

Time for the noctilucents though ? I'm hoping for a better NLC year (last year was a disaster). I had only one visual report & no images . Ready to rumble yet again for the new season.

[BillW]

Absolutely, That's the plan for the next couple of months!

[BillW]

Now that the NLC season is drawing to a close it's back to meteor observing.

Using a laboratory Mercury lamp I did some bench tests with the CCD camera and the 12500 lines per inch plastic grating.

With my 12mm f1.2 lens I'm getting ~1nm/pix. Not too bad for a meteor system. Significantly better than the video system which is ~5nm/pix.

I hope the weather cooperates next weekend for the Perseids.

Cheers,
Bill.

[BillW]

Hi all,
Finally got a little brass spacer to use with the 25mm f0.85 lens.
I don't know about meteor results but what a combination with the ATIK CCD.
A beautiful night last night, so put the camera on the tripod at the back door. After focussing let it run for an hour. With a 15 second exposure I can just touch +8 stellar and altough no meteors, a little disappointing as just one would have been nice to prove the system, there were dozens and dozens of satellite tracks.

However the problem is image number. At that exposure, over say the quadrantids, if it was clear I could produce around 3300 images in a single long dark night! eeek that's a lot of pics to review.

Then I tried fitting on the grating holder and it works well, I can rotate to any angle and get down to ~+2 stellar with the grating on.
Here's hoping for some good results over the winter.
Now to sort out the chopping shutter.
cheers,
Bill.