Fastar Imaging

Before July 2001 most of my Fastar imaging was done on the driveway at home. The telescope is sitting on a home made wooden cart with wheels and the computer is on a wheeled cart for quick setup on the driveway. The telescope cart is lifted a few inches and placed on concrete blocks. Aluminum plates are put between the cart and concrete blocks to level the telescope. On the driveway are three white lines that prvide very rought polar alignment.

The computer monitor is covered with red plastic to cut down the glare and at night a towel is placed on the top of the monitor to prevent dew damage. During the night it is easy to move the computer cart so that it is always behind the telescope reducing monitor glare that might affect the image.

It takes about 25 minutes from the time I get home from work to be ready to polar align using the drift method. For example, I get home from work at 7:00 pm and I can be ready to image by 8:00 providing it is dark enought (which is not the case in the summer). During the spring and fall I can image for about 3 hours on a work night until about 11:00 pm when I stop. Teardown is much quicker taking less than 10 minutes.

The next day I use a 10BaseT LAN cable to transfer the image and calibraion files from my outside Windows 98 SE computer to the Windows 2000 imaging processing computer inside the house. This is easly implemented with file sharing between the two computers. Keeping the camera control computer outside results in not subjecting it to temperature changes and mositure by bring it in the house. A weekend all night imaging session can easly generate over 700 files with over 400 MB of data.

The red trailer behind the telescope is used for imaging in darker eastern Oregon, USA during trips during the summer.

SBIG ST-237 CCD Camera is mounted on a Celestron C8 telescope with Fastar lense assembly. The below equipment used in my setup.

• Santa Barbara Instrument Group (SBIG) ST-237 CCD Camera
• Celestron C8 telescope with Fastar lense assembly
• Losmandy G-11 telescope mount with C8 dovetails and finder rings.
• Jim's Moblile Digital Read out Motofocus is a must have accessary for focusing.
• Lumicon 80mm right-angle Super-Finder with correct left-right erect diagonal
• Orion Telescopes & Binoculars EZ Finder Reflex Sight provides a quick way to sight a star before using the Super-Finder to star hop to the object's location. Objects are easly found Using the ST-237 CCD camera's 5 second 3x3 binned exposure mode and its 41 x 31 arcminutes field of view.
• Kendrick Dew Remover System on the C8 and Super-Finder, not shown in the photo is Kendrick Dew Cap. Also, the Dew Cap reduces light problems when cars drive by the house and protects the ST-237 camera during storage in the house.
• A cheap used LSI Pentium 90 MHz computer is used for camera control.
• Cyanogen Productions, Inc. MaxIm DL CCD software is used to control the ST-237 CCD Camera.

At this time all my images are unguided and I do not use the G-11 PEC.

My Camas location is affect by the large sky glow of Portland, Oregon, USA to the south and West.

Fastar image index and below are the images I like the best.

• M33 Spiral Galaxy
• M51 Whirlpool Galaxy
• M63 Sunflower Galaxy
• M81 Bode's Galaxy
• M97 Owl Nebula
• M106 Spiral Galaxy
• M109 Spiral Galaxy

© 1998-2003 David Haworth