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NEAIC and NEAF Reports
David Illig - 4/26/2008
Special to HAL, live from the
Northeast Astro-Imaging Conference and the Northeast Astronomy Forum at Rockland
Community College, Suffern, NY:
Hello,
There was too much covered in the various NEAIC seminars to report here, of
course. You may see a list of seminars at rocklandastronomy.com. In
breakout sessions I attended Warren Keller's presentation on AstroArt; Peter
Ceravolo's "Wide Field Imaging with
Monster CCD's"; Steve Bisque's introduction to TheSkyX Serious Astronomer
Edition; Neil Fleming's talk on narrow-band imaging as a way to get good results
under bad skies; Dietmar Heger's brilliant talk on hi-res imaging with a folded
9" apochromatic refractor; and Robert Reeves on advances in webcam photography.
One of his slides showed a Philips ToUCam doing serious research on a two-meter
reflector!
I don't have Dietmar Heger's URL handy, but I recommend looking at his web site.
Dr. Heger, who lives in Austria, is possessed of a great personality, a gift for
conveying information in a manner that rivets his audience, and, it is obvious,
great genius.
I came away from Peter Ceravolo's talk with a Zen-like feeling of perfect
balance: I can't afford a monster CCD _or_ the 'scope it would take to cover the
52 mm diagonal from such a chip (about $18k for the camera, and from maybe $15k
to $90k for an _amateur_ 'scope to go with it.)
There were a number of high-end vendors set up in the foyer outside the main
conference room, including SBIG, Yankee Robotics, Takahashi, Software Bisque,
OPT, Starizona, Finger Lakes, OGS, Adirondack, and certainly not least, "Uncle"
Al Nagler of Tele Vue. Unlike at NEAF (same venue, Saturday and Sunday) the
vendors were showing and telling, but not selling.
SBIG are showing several cameras, including a prototype from the new STX series.
Three of the STX cameras are described as back-illuminated with high QE. Two of
the new cameras will available in mono or color, and one will be color only.
Alan Holmes, the president of SBIG, told me that he didn't know what they were
going to do about filters, but there would *not* be a filter "wheel" with the
new cameras. "Jukebox, maybe?" he said. No pricing is available.
Software Bisque were running TheSkyX Serious Astronomer Edition side-by-side on
a Mac and a Windows machine, both with large displays. If you're a fan of SB,
there is good news for you no matter what your choice of OS. SB are integrating
virtually all of their software into TheSkyX. It will include CCD camera
control, TPoint, Orchestrate,
AutomaDome, etc. The various modules will ship with the advanced versions of
TheSkyX, but one will pay extra to activate them (presumably cafeteria style,
with a cost for each module, though I did not confirm that). I think that makes
sense; one who prefers other
software for CCD control, or who doesn't need TPoint, won't be forced to buy
those features. The new software will run under Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. I
think it is not yet clear how much image reduction will be done with the CCD
module; there may remain an external CCDSoft-like program. At the moment only
the TheSkyX Student Edition is available, and it has no device control. Release
of the advanced editions depends
on the completion of lots of drivers for mounts and cameras. Richard Wright, a
Florida-based Bisque contract programmer, reported in an on-line forum that he
used an advanced version of TheSkyX running on a Mac to control a mount at the
Winter Star Party, and that it performed beautifully. If you are a Software
Bisque fan, you have some greatly improved software to look forward to, IMO.
Speaking of MaximDL, Doug George, developer of MaximDL, is showing a preview of
version 5. I didn't have a chance to look at it in depth, but I did see that it
corrects some interface issues, such as the File>Open dialog box not being
resizable. Hallelujah! Doug may bring Maxim to the Mac, as well.
John Stiles of Optical Guidance Systems (I bought my Tak Epsilon from him) had a
stunning carbon-fiber R-C 'scope with him. Unfortunately, with the depressed
real estate market, I'm not certain my house would fetch enough to buy the
'scope *and* a spot in a mobile-home park.
Now imaging school is out, we've all graduated, and the fun begins tomorrow at
NEAF. Not many people are aware of this, but in January Roland Christen wrote in
the AstroMart Astro-Physics forum "...I have something else cooking that will
maybe revolutionize imaging. I plan to show it at Neaf end of April."
If that's true, I'll let you know what it is.
Louis Mamakos is here and sends y'all a fond wave.
Breaking news as it happens.
David
P.S. I'm working on a new web site to display my miserable astrophotography
efforts. It's at
http://www.primordial-light.com.
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