Equipment

The observatory houses a 20-cm Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, with a built-in GPS unit, Ultra-High Transmission Coatings, and Smart Mount Technology. The latter was useful when the telescope operated in Alt-Az mode before the observatory was built, but is no longer being utilized.

I use three different imaging systems on this telescope. The primary system is a black and white MallinCam Hyper video camera. This unit enables me to obtain images with limiting magnitudes of 17-18 in just seconds. I can go a little bit deeper by using the camera's time exposure mode. The other two imaging systems are the Philips ToUcam and the Canon Digital Rebel DSLR. Both obtain color images, with the ToUcam used primarily for the sun, moon, and planets, and the Canon used for deep sky objects and comets.

I have two computer systems running in the observatory. Both are Dell Gx 400's running at 1.7GHz. Each unit has 256MB of RAM. One unit is totally dedicated to controlling the telescope and is connected to the internet to allow updates of comet and minor planet orbits. The primary guiding software is Guide 8.0 by Project Pluto. The other unit is dedicated to imaging and has an external 250GB hard disk. Flat panel displays are attached to each computer.

The best images are obtained with the MallinCam and the ToUcam. Both systems operate by making AVI movies. These are then processed using Registax, which is a powerful, free program. It is virtually impossible to take images on a night with perfect seeing and transparency, but Registax takes the best frames from the AVI movies and creates an excellent rendition of whatever I photographed. Details are brought out on planets that the visual observer may have only glimpsed and details within a comet's tail or the arms of a galaxy are brought out that might have only been detectable using much larger telescopes.