New Astrocam

I splashed out on a new CCD camera for astronomy this week. An Atik 16IC-S which is a 16-bit monochrome camera with peltier cooling, resolution is 782×582 pixels. The chip is progressive scan as well. This is a big improvement over the Watec I have been using, which is great for live views of objects but its 10s maximum exposure and noisy output is restrictive for deep sky imaging. The Atik can do unlimited exposures but since my telescope is not autoguiding (yet) I’m limited to about 30-60s which is about as good as my mount can do. You can see my first efforts from last night in my photo gallery. I’m thinking of splitting off the astronomy images into their own gallery by the way.

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John Talbot

The main protagonist behind this nonsense. The website title is inspired by the lyrics of the B-side to Lily the Pink by The Scaffold. "The buttons of your mind were difficult to find and my fingers far too clumsy."