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Old 30-07-2008, 10:11 PM
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coldspace
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Join Date: May 2007
Location: Brisbane
Posts: 506
If you want to see images in real time then a Astro video like the Mallincam or G-star is the go. You won't need to use an EQ mount as these camera's don't go over 1minute of intergrated exposure. Thus no field rotation. You will neen at least ALT/AZ tracking though to keep the object centred. The G-star is B/w and does not have cooling but is a very capable camera for real time viewing at around $700 bucks and can be sourced locally. The Mallincam is a very highly modified unit and is colour with cooling and hyper circuitry to increase the gain with very little noise and intergrated exposures upto 1 minute but has to be ordered from Canada via the US at around $1600 landed here. Both these cameras will show you far more detail in light pollution than what you could see in the 12 inch under dark skies. So you can imagine what they can do under dark skies.

I use the colour mallincam and a 12 inch Meade and the views are unreal to say the least. Looking at M16 the other night the pillars of creation stood out in full colour and the dust lanes were clearly visable all done in 28 second intergrations in suburban Brissy last Saturday night. Lagoon, trifid were also a sight to behold. Looked at numerous globs, some that are almost impossible to resolve clearly under dark skies were easy targets at 14 second intergrations. The bug and box panetaries also were great. M83 , silver coin and M104 Galaxies were also nice targets. All these,unless you have reasonbly dark skies are fairly boring targets at the eyepiece in suburbia.

If you want to only use a video system you could put your Dob onto a round-table dob tracker like they use alot overseas and this would be excellent for holding an object for higher power viewing as well as been adequate for use with an Astro video system. You could then use an Argo Navis for finding things.

My mount is Alt/Az and I only get a slight field rotation showing when I have the scope pointed near Zenith and the mallincam set to 56 second intergration. But this does not cause any trouble for real time viewing, Most of the time the camera points alot lower and I only use 7,14 or 28 second intergrations.

This won't be a problem using a G-star camera as well.

Just some more thoughts for you to consider. To find out more join the Yahoo Mallincam or G-star user groups on the Yahoo site. You will find out alot more on these systems there.

Regards Matt.
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