An old friend returns – some DMK31 Lunar scapes

[Dennis]

Hello

Here are some Moonscapes from the Tak Mewlon 180 F12 taken at prime focus. The jet stream has been dominant, hovering over Brisbane the last week or so making the seeing conditions quite poor; the image would not stand up to a Barlow or PowerMate.

The 1200 frame avi’s were processed in Registax 4 with the final stacks ranging from 29 to 375 frames, showing how variable the seeing was. I let R4 choose the alignment points and the choices ranged from 17 to 32! Boy, did R4 take a loooong time to chug through those avi’s!

Those nice people from Bintel came up to the Qld Astrofest with a DMK31AF04.AS (Firewire) at a fire sale price, so I just had to take it off their hands to save Mike carrying it back to the Sydney shop! It was simply fabulous to be able to capture at the 1024x768 size of the DMK31 compared to the postage stamp sized 640x480 DMK.

It is worth noting that despite the poor seeing, the small craterlets in Plato are still resolved at the prime focus of the ‘scope, something which really surprised me.

Cheers

Dennis

[Liz]

BEEEEEautiful Dennis, thank you

[sheeny (Al)]

Nice work Dennis!

The larger FOV of the 31 is nice too. Looking forward to seeing the results at higher magnification.

Al.

[TrevorW]

Great images well done !!

[RB (Andrew)]

Absolutely stunning vistas Dennis, thanks for sharing.
I've been thinking about the DMK31 now for a while too, looks like a great camera.

[Quark (Trevor)]

Dennis, these are vert nice images.
The larger format looks great.

Just wondered about the data transfer rate with the larger format. What sort of frame rate can you download with the larger format?

Regards
Trevor

[Ric]

Top stuff Dennis, there's some lovely detail in these image.

It's like you are looking out of the windows of an obiting craft, makes me want to step out and go for a walk.

[Matty P (Matt)]

Stunning images Dennis, lovely detail.

The larger FOV of the DMK 31 is awesome. Great for the Moon.

[Dennis]

Thanks Liz, Al, TrevorW, Andrew, Trevor, Ric & Matt for those words of appreciation; I was initially unsure about posting these relatively low resolution shots but I think their lack of scale is compensated for with the wider views they offer.

Ric put it rather nicely, although I hope he doesn’t step outside without his space suit!

Trevor (Quark): I was able to capture at the maximum rate of 30 fps on my 4 ½ year old IBM ThinkPad R40 which has a Centrino 1.4Ghz processor, 512Mb RAM and a Firewire PCMCIA card in the slot.

The screen image seemed to refresh only every couple of seconds, although the data stream at 30 fps appears to be okay with no dropped frames.

Cheers

Dennis