Quote:
Originally Posted by sil
I'm really excited to get mine and see how well it performs. My hope is it'll allow me to get more astrophotography done easier, as a stroke left me without a working left arm and walking/balance difficulties that make it difficult to use my heavier gear (hell any gear really). I think this'll work nicely on my polarie and I really hope the built in augmented reality star map will make it easier to get my targets in shot without a lot of painful guesswork I currently have. I also hope it doesn't rely on a mobile phone for operation, I've been burnt a few times because the apps tend to only be developed for current generation OSes and I can't afford (or want) to upgrade my phone every few months. My iphone is permanently stuck on iOS7 and won't update.
Also sounds like it might be fun to play as a daytime IR camera, I assume there will be a manual/custom white balance option to help with that? I couldn't see anything about photographing the sun, again I assume the sensor is safe to do that with an appropriate baader filter attached or through a solarscope (I havent done much photoagraphy with my coronado again because of difficulties).
I've heard on forums some people "poo-pooing" the Tiny1 for all the usual ignorant reasons: sensor size, pixel size, etc etc. TinyMOS are not claim this is a pocket replace for expensive SBIG and other dedicated imaging systems. Nor is it a replacement for DSLRs. But it does look like an easy option for people to get into some good astrophotography a bit more accessibly, and maybe fill in the gap between traditional photography and typical astrophotography (ie lots of capture frames and post processing work). I'm definitely keen to test it against my D800 and hopefully get back outside looking at the skies a bit more.
I've just gotten an email from TinyMOS. There's an android app demo you can check out (I only have one phone not android so can't try myself) http://bit.ly/tin1demo.
Also there are some Tiny1 cameras available to preorder at early bird price at: http://bit.ly/Tiny1_secretperk. |
Thank you for your kind words Sil. Yes, we did get some flak because we're quite unconventional in our hardware design.
Now to answer your questions:
1) Yes it works in standalone mode. That's a major thing we wanted to solve. We tried using scientific cameras before, the fact that we needed our laptop leaves a lot to be desired. It makes the trip so much more complicated.
2) It is designed to work with both iOS and Android. We try to maintain compatibility as much as possible but cannot guarantee iOS 7 at the moment.
3) Daytime IR would be possible with a software switch. However you'll need to find a way to get an IR pass filter. That is something we haven't looked into yet.
4) We've imaged the Sun before with a Thousand Oak filter during the solar eclipse. We've also imaged the Sun before using a 0.5A Etalon with help from the National University of Singapore. We'll see if can publish those soon.
5) Regarding WB for IR in day time - we're looking into that but we can't confirm if we can get natural colors without the IR cut filter. It appears we need to use some color remapping to achieve that and it wouldn't work in all conditions. Probably best left to advanced users (:
Keep the questions coming, we'll answer them to the best we can.
Cheers,
Grey
On behalf of TinyMOS team
get.tinymos.com