[Wavytone]

Regarding the atlas, I recall seeing a modern attempt circa 1990 to recreate a similar one using images taken with a 35mm camera and filters from the Blue Mountains. It was a fairly heroic effort on the part of two amateurs.

As one who was a scholar at Stromlo, from memory another similar atlas was compiled from plates taken with the camera atop the Oddie refractor. That camera was actually an aerial photography lens of WWII vintage - roughly 20" focal length and f/5 and the plateholder took quarter plates (4" x 5").

Where the 8” f/1 schmidt went.. unknown.. but it would have been a royal pain to cut the film for it and load the film holder all in the dark.

Someone in that era also donated a Perkin Elmer Minitrack Optical Tracking System (MOTS) to the Canberra Astro Society. The MOTS was based on an aerial camera - 8" aperture f/5 (1 meter focal length) designed to cover full-size 8"x 10" glass plates (!) and its purpose was to image satellites in order to measure their orbits, in the early days of the space race (1960 onwards). The snag with both the camera on the Oddie and the MOTS is that (a) neither were particularly well corrected chromatically, meaning you had to use a monochromatic colour filter t get anything resembling a half-respectable image, (b) optically they were not particularly sharp - nowhere near diffraction limited - so the images from them did not tolerate signifiant enlargement. Attempts to visually observe images with an eyepiece through the MOTS showed the images were fairly atrocious and nothing like what any of us would think of as useful, visually. Both lacked modern antireflection coatings so even with an air-spaced triplet, the transmission was below 50% simply because of the losses at each air-glass surface.

I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but aerial cameras imaging onto glass plates are from an era when the prints were made as contact prints - ie you placed the plate on the paper emulsion-side down so the print is a 1:1 copy - not enlarged.

Another aspect of that atlas is compiling the mosaics was an art in itself, and frankly only possible with a permanent setup where the camera once focussed could be left in that state for months while the plates were taken, probably no more than 1 or 2 per night, and using contact printing to ensure the prints were all at exactly the same scale.

Depending on what was available from the store, you could either use a box of Kodak plates, or if keen, you could mix the chemicals and make the emulsion and coat the plates yourself. The Oddie also had a darkroom beside the scope - after exposure you could develop it then and there.

I had used that camera few times out of curiosity, though rapidly realised that photographically it was quite a slow combination - shooting 35mm film through my 8" Newtonian atop the Oddie gave far better results (sharper and deeper) though obviously over a much smaller field.

Today however the scopes we use are designed for tiny, tiny sensors - which requires diffraction-limited performance over a small field of view. However, the images from these will stand huge enlargements - think of the size of say a 27" computer monitor vs the sensor size.

So unless you have a box of 8" x 10" plates somewhere or a box of quarter plates, these cameras are now useless junk.