On Wed, 28 May 2003, Greg Roberts wrote: > (4) My partner in crime - Willie Koorts - has made a modification to > his 1004x camera board which increases the brightness of fainter > stars somewhat. He will be modifying my camera this week ( he has > a steadier hand and better eyes than me as well as the proper type > of soldering iron for working on SMT (surface mount technology) > so hopefully I will gain a little magnitude as every bit helps. As Greg pointed out, I finally gathered enough courage to dive into my 1004x low light surveillance camera and added two simple modifications to it with good results. See http://www.saao.ac.za/~wpk/1004x/index.html Compared to the "manual gain" mod which has an astronomical imaging application, the "boost" mod has good potential for video satellite tracking where we prefer to run the camera at video rates. This is particularly true for the accurate positional work Greg does where he timestamps each video frame to 1/10 sec, something that is not possible when integrating or stacking frames to obtain deeper penetration. Thus, for satellite tracking, where we are forced to use short exposures (1/25 or 1/30 sec), increasing the gain of the camera does slightly improve its limiting magnitude, even though it increases the noise. It will be very interesting to hear what Greg (or anyone else who does the same) finds after doing this modification. Hats off to Steve Chambers and Jon Grove for their pioneering work on hacking into these cameras with good success and for Greg Roberts applying these ideas, setting new trends and standards in high accuracy positional satellite tracking. And last but not least, for Bill Turner bringing me such a wonderful present on his last visit to SA. Regards Willie ps For a very-much-in-need-to-be-updated site on what Greg and myself have been up to the last few years, see http://www.saao.ac.za/~wpk/CoSaTrak/cosatrak.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from SeeSat-L, send a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org List archived at http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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