Thursday 15th May 2014 - DSLR imaging using the "Wilkinson" interface
Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 12:55PM On March 1st 2010 I tried out the Cable interface provided by Ross Wilkinson of the Bolton Astro Soc for the first time. Taking images with such a wide field of view certainly brings home the extent of light pollution in Leyland - even before the Moon rose!
My Sony DSLR (mounted on my piggy backed 102 mm Meade refractor) was linked to the computer by this device and used the free software "DSLR Shutter" to specify the length and number of exposures.
A bonus was that there was no difficulty in running the software at the same time as my SBIG CCD camera on my 12" Meade OTA which meant that I could start a sequence of DSLR exposures remotely from my study - although of course I could not see the results coming in. However it meant that I could use my SBIG camera as an autoguider which I did. I did not exceed 10 minutes as an exposure however as by that time the Moon was just above the horizon and images were beginning to white out!
The first diffficulty was focusing. The DSLR has a rotatable viewing screen which I thought would make it possible to see a bright star so I slewed to Procyon which was just east of south. I set a 1 second exposure which gave this image - my first DSLR image of a star!
I tried again after racking out the focus
and again
and finally
Other images were taken of M44
and NGC 2419 the globular cluster.
