Imaging Source Astronomy Cameras for gazing at the heavens

Stellar photography seems like a wondrous thing: you and a loved one on a starry night taking beautiful images of the heavens -- before making out. Unfortunately, anyone who has tried it knows it's more often a frustrating exercise of fiddling with exposure and aperture settings on your SLR while it hangs precariously off the side of your telescope, held in place only by a flimsy adapter ring. The Imaging Source has a simpler option, a series of digital cameras designed for slotting into your scope like an eye piece, capturing the night sky at up to 60-minute exposures over USB or FireWire. The range starts at $390 for a monochromatic VGA model, going all the way up to $870 for color and 1280 x 960 resolution. Not cheap, but it's probably a lot less than you paid for the equatorial mount on your new reflector.

[Via Picture Snob; thanks Jay]

[gabe @ May 29th 2008 8:48PM]

"...you and a loved one on a starry night taking beautiful images of the heavens -- before making out."

Unfortunately this doesn't pertain to any of Engadget's members whose demographics are comprised of 99% single male virgins. :P

[rayw @ May 29th 2008 9:02PM]

Speak for yourself. I can say however that this would be useless since we would most likely be fast-forwarding to the making-out bit ...

[CraigJ @ May 29th 2008 9:42PM]

I think you have Digg readers confused with Engadget readers...

[luke @ May 29th 2008 10:14PM]

For the price, I'm not sure I see the advantage over a real CCD. A solid Meade or Celestron CCD only costs about $500-1500.

[Harley3k @ May 29th 2008 10:46PM]

I agree. The sample images on the site all seem to be planetary, lunar, and solar. So perhaps the cameras aren't meant for deepsky, and thus lack antiblooming and blue-sensitivity like SBIG cameras.

For eyepiece projection, planetery, lunar, and solar photography though you won't ever do more than a fraction fo a second exposure, so the 60 minute exposure time doesn't do a lot of good, and the lack of autoguiding feature, would require a separate autoguider camera and scope. May as well use a good SLR and a $50 mount.

[Tony @ May 30th 2008 12:37AM]

yeah, I don't understand how this is different from any other product thats out there currently..