[gerry aarts (Gerry)]

WOOOOOW, it looks great. My first image taken with the new Meade DSI 111 Colour camera.

Took this one last Sunday night 27 02 2007, a brief two hour opportunity before Moon rise. There was some high cloud about and at Cranebrook an outer suburb of Sydney, the seeing was by no means great.

But surprise, surprise a very nice image. Used my Celestron GPS11 together with the “Hyperstar” f1.8 lens mounted on the front of the corrector plate (see attached image).

Imaging at f1.8 works 32 times faster then imaging at f10 so, a 32 seconds image at f1.8 is like exposing a 320 seconds (5.3 minutes) image at f10. In addition I get a very wide field of view on the Meade DSI 2/3rd inch chip that lets me capture the whole Orion Nebula. (see attached middle image)

The attached image is 40 x 15 seconds exposures combined on the fly with the Meade DFSI Envisage software. Then processed in Photoshop.

I did not use my wedge and took this one in Altazimuth mode. Take a look at the attached unprocessed image (the last image), you see how the Meade Drizzle de-rotation software works. A great feature when you have insufficient time to spend on polar aligning.

I am looking forward to some clear dark skies and try the DSI III out on a few distant galaxies with a polar aligned scope.

There are some software issues with the DSI III that remain unresolved. The DSI Envisage software freezes up then crashes, but thankfully not during actual imaging.

When switching functions in Envisage software or screens it had the problem. The software is also supposed to work with multiple cameras but the Envisage program completely freezes when I attach the original DSIc and the DSI III.

I am using a Toshiba laptop, 1.7 Ghz Intel Pentium processor, 512 Mb ram and have 17 Ghz free disc space. I would have thought that to be enough computer power. The old DSIc and Envisage software works fine, so I think the new software may have a bug.
Anyone have any ideas how to resolve this?

More Images at my Western Sydney Amateur Astronomy Group web site
http://wsaag.org

Regards
Gerry