This shot shows where a Perseid meteor comes from, the ncp is left and you can see Perseus and Pleiades very clearly(and Mars!) and possibly the Double Cluster. http://www.utahastronomy.com/album57/000287_G?full=1 If you back up you can see the other frames. Most of the other tracks were either quite faint or just at the edge of the frame. One actually has two faint tracks. Cheers David ----- Original Message ----- From: Naz & David To: ZZ_Utah Astro List Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 11:11 PM Subject: Re: Wolf Creek Stellacam3 Images Richard, the mount I'm using is a Vixen GPDX, I have a controller that I can program for PEC but I didn't bother this evening. This limits exposure to about 30sec but I was only polar aligned as good as the alignment scope can give me and that can limit things as well. The camera is available from Ariondack for $900 uncooled, I use a b/w 9" Sony monitor (with a red acrolyte filter) I picked up off ebay for $15. That's all you need if you don't want to record your images. You could use a video camera/recorder for that but I choose to use a frame capture card and an old clunker laptop (still running w98!). I managed to make a movie of the Perseids frames (mpeg-4, runs on my iPod Video which is kind of cool). From this I was able to pick out nine obvious "strikes". Tracing their path back (tricky because the lens distorts things a bit), seven came from the Perseids expected radiant north of Perseus but two bright ones seemed to come from Cassiopeia. I'll put the nine frames on the gallery when it comes back up, the movies too big to post but it looks great on the b/w monitor via the iPod! Cheers David ----- Original Message ----- From: Naz & David To: ZZ_Utah Astro List Sent: Monday, August 13, 2007 11:12 PM Subject: Wolf Creek Stellacam3 Images I posted in my gallery (http://www.utahastronomy.com/album53) a set of single frame captures of various dso's I observed on Saturday night at Wolf Creek using a Stellacam3 and 7.1" MCT. They pretty much match what I was seeing real time on the monitor, most objects I had refreshing somewhere between 10 to 15sec integration, a few a bit less and some at 25 to 30sec. I didn't really track camera settings etc as I was enjoying the object detail too much, just about a full five hours observing before the wind picked up at 0300hrs. The images certainly aren't pretty compared to what you get with a bigger ccd, many minutes worth of stacked images and a bunch of image processing mucking about but having these real time (and at much less cost) makes up for it. The camera appears to triple or more the aperture of my little scope. When the wind started I set a StellacamII up with Tamron 4-12mm CCTV lens and put it on a tripod and pointed it east in an attempt to capture a few Perseids. Took about 85minutes of 8.5sec exposures but have not had time to see if I got anything yet. Cheers David