Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Better CCD sensor cleaning

I was not really happy after I cleaned the CCD of my astrocam with alcohol. There remained some kind of haze on the sensor. Therefore I got real swabs and cleaning fluid, specially for CCDs. That got rid of the annoying haze. Below are 2 flats. One before and one after the cleaning. The haze of visible in the bottom of the picture.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Nagler 7mm type 1 eyepiece



This is my first "high end" eyepiece. A 7mm type 1 Televue Nagler. I was already looking for upgrades of my venerable 8mm Hyperion (which is a very good eyepiece) since I use 125x a lot for bright deepsky objects. I am looking forward to its first light.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Strange CCD linearity curve

This is a linearity measurement of my Artemis4021 CCD. What is very strange is the jump halfway the graph....I am still very puzzled what that can be. I have it with Nebulosity2 and ArtemisCapture capturing software...
After consulting some fellow-astronomers on the internet I decided to put extra paper between the EL panel and the CCD sensor, thus increasing the exposure time drastically. What is very clear, is that I have to stay away from the 2.30sec exposure time, because from that point on, the sensor is almost linear. See the new curve I made with longer exposures:
This is more like it. I am very happy with it.