Instrumentation and Equipment

Purchased a 533MM and 8 position 1.25" filter wheel. The LRGB filters were in stock, but Chroma have not responded yet to the dealer regarding my order of a UBVRI set of filters. Not even sure the time involved yet, and it's been two weeks. My DSLR is no longer functional, so took this opportunity to upgrade. Since we FINALLY are having a string of good weather, would like to get back to monitoring my 5-6 SNEWS stars and others visible reliably from my yard.

I have a situation where I need to monitor the view through my "targeting" eyepiece with a camera instead of my eyeball.  Eyepiece is only 1.25" (a ramsden with limited field-of-view).  Can anyone recommend a suitable USB camera - preferably USB-C - with a frame rate rapid enough for performing fine pointing adjustments?  I probably need 8 feet of cable to reach the computer in all sky positions.  Oh, and camera needs to be supported on Linux.

Tom

I heard today that they closed and declared bankruptcy yesterday. Can anyone confirm or refute??

I bought a Askar M54 filter drawer.

The plan was to get some Baader photometric filters and use the filter drawer to swap them during an observing run.

Most of my previous filters (non-photometric) did NOT fit the Baader drawer.  I asked a friend to bring his ZWO filter drawer and though slightly "higher" than the Askar most of my filters again did not fit.

I called Alpine Astro and the Baader photometric filters will not fit in either drawer.

You are invited to a one-hour webinar on June 8 featuring brief talks from three AAVSO Sections:

• Exoplanets
• Young Stellar Objects
• Instrumentation & Equipment

We’ll also discuss the AAVSO's Section system, and ways to get involved.

Registration and additional information here.

Several other Sections have begun holding periodic zoom meetings, notably the exoplanet section.

What do you folks think about I&E hosting zoom meetings? Also: When?? I'm retired in the EST time zone, where are you all and what's your availability?

Some possible topics are:

     Hardware hounds may be interested in the detailed description of new CMOS cameras and other upgrades to their fleet of 0.4-m telescopes.  The instruments are now wide-field PlaneWave Delta-Rho 35cm f/3 telescopes.  Various performance details, electronics modifications, etc are outlined.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10408

An upgraded 0.4-meter telescope fleet for Las Cumbres Observatory's Educational and Science Programs

\Brian

I am investigating the possible use of 16-bit CMOS cameras from ZWO or Player One with a robotic scope using ACP/Scheduler and MaximDL. Some years back, at least, ZWO cameras might not have played well with Maxim, but these cameras now have ASCOM drivers. Bottomline: Is anyone using a ZWO or Player-one CMOS camera with Maxim DL?

I recently purchased a reconditioned Nikon z50 with the 16-50mm zoom lens for dome search photography. I’ve used Nikon DSLR equipment for many years now for nova search and photometry, with older fixed focal length manual lenses. 

At Saturday's NEAF a presentation was given on using a diffusor instead of defocusing in photometry.

Does anyone have experience with this technique??

The paper is at:  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5dc2092b0cc0f705fcd3b180/t/5dd0b1dfb1497a3f86e0930e/1573958117246/neaic2019exoplanetpresentation.pdf

Peter

BPEC