Visit at OBE - François Colas / CCD versus CMOS !

July 16th: some clouds but I was able to open the dome and use the scope. I changed the camera from the CMOS PL1M (QHY5) to an Atik 314L+ CCD camera... what a change! Here is a difference between shots the night before and tonight with similar exposure times - no doubt, CCD wins :

I also changed my Losmandy Gemini Serial cable with a newer and longer one and it did improve a lot with only one time-out during the night. Need to pass the cables through the ground canal now...


François Colas from Paris observatory visited and we played around with the equipment & PRISM v9 software. We took some exposures (11x30sec, dark substracted) of some deep sky objects and we also played with astrometry & photometry functions (sky background measured at 17.7 due to thin layer of clouds; seeing around 3.4").

For initial focal length calculation and image automatic astrometry, we used http://nova.astrometry.net web site which is terrific. We had to use JPEG instead of FITS to get a result in a reasonable time.

 Hercules globular cluster M13

M92 globular cluster

Lyrae "ring nebula" M57

Dumbell (M27) planetary nebula

NGC6888 Crescent nebula

Acquisition session in PRISM v9

Automatic observation in PRISM v9

 Automatic observation: beta Lyrae star (Shelyak)!

 Auçtomatic astrometry in PRISM v9

 François Colas in control!

Configuration of the night for imaging