Well, we’ve waited all summer for out new equipment to arrive, and one Monday, it did so. Needless to say, there was great rejoicing for John, Cindy, and Greg (Ryan was out of town; he might be rejoicing, we don’t know). It was like Christmas, only a lot warmer and without the egg nog.
We busied ourselves unpacking the new CCD camera right away, since we have no sense of restraint. It was pretty cool for the three of us to assemble to thing. The first thing that we noticed was that it has a very large, white little-black-box (the little-black-box controls the CCD camera and its temperature). It seems to have an operating temperature of -30 C, 5 degrees cooler than what we usually run the St-6 ‘s at. Cindy oggled at the flat-field that arrived with it; after spending better than half the summer fighting with the ST-6’s about getting nice flats, this was a welcomed change.
We also noticed that it lacks a snout to connect it to a telescope right now, so for the time being it gets mounted onto the piggy-back spot on one of the LX-200’s. It currently has a Nikon lens instead of telescope, so we are getting very wide field, low magnification shots.
The first test of the system was to get a couple shots of Doug, who came by right then. Not surprisingly, Doug squirmed a lot, so we didn’t get many good pictures of him, but we verified that the camera worked. More importantly, perhaps, we were all very impressed by the speed of this new wonder. While the ST-6’s take over a minute to take a full image, this camera takes maybe 10 seconds. John and Cindy also took the camera out the next morning for the occultation of Aldeberan. The field seemed too wide and the range of brightness was too large to get any really great shots, but the system did work.
Doofy Pictures of Astronomy People Testing a Camera
Here are some downright doofy shots of us as we test various features of the camera:
“family portrait” of the people involved.
At this point we are still testing to see that the thing really works. The people here are Greg, Doug, and Cindy. Notice that Doug is always ruining the shot by making faces. We can’t take him anywhere;. John is taking the picture, hence not in this shot.
John discovers scripting, and proceeds to make an idiot of himself.
The new software allows for scripts to be written, which means we can a take a whole series of images quickly (like of, say, an occultation). It also mean that we can make movies. Hollywood, here we come!
Notice that John quickly gets bored before the camera; he has a short attention span.
When we took the images, Aldeberan did not show up really well. But look at it now!
The Pleaides
Taken during the occultation.
Joel Weisberg
By this point, we’re getting pretty good with the camera, so we had to show off to Joel. So we captured his soul on the CCD chip. Pretty nifty, huh?