K3PGP - Experimenters Corner - Very early astropix (1995-1996)

Early astrophotography work (1995-1996)
Recent Low Light camera experiments are HERE!


Shot of the moon taken through a 6 inch reflecting telescope. You might want to experiment with the brightness and contrast settings of your computer display to bring out various details in these photos.	Same image after computer gamma correction and detail enhancement. Both of these shots were taken with the CCD TV camera mounted at prime focus. Both of these images have been compressed to .JPG format resulting in some loss of detail.

This image was taken using the eyepiece as a projection setup to focus the image on the CCD TV camera. By adjusting the distance between the eyepiece and the camera the magnification can be adjusted. When the magnification is increased to extremely high levels atmospheric seeing becomes a severe problem. The image to the left looks extremely good when viewed on the monitor in real time as the human eye and the persistance of the phospor screen in the TV monitor tends to average succesive frames. When using a frame grabber you end up trying to freeze an image that is 'walking' around with the result that it appears blurred.

The black specs are dust particles on the CCD imaging device. I had some setup problems and managed to get it dirty but didn't want to risk cleaning it in the field. Since this is a monochrome camera all of the 'TV' photos are in Black and White.

The color image to the left was made using an experimental CCD camera built from a Logictech hand held color scanner!

The scanner is mounted over the eyepiece of the telescope and is triggered by a crystal controlled oscillator while the rotation of the earth moves the image of the moon across the active area of the scanner. That's right! Instead of trying to track the object being photographed I just let it drift through the field of view while I scan one line at a time!

The slight grain in this photo is an artifact of the .JPG encoding process. However, I think you will have no problem seeing the increased detail in this photo compared to the ones done with the TV style CCD camera.

Click on the image to the left to see the full resolution image.