NEAIC Finishes

It was a busy day with a long talk by Ron Dantowitz who was trying to make up for lost time after missing yesterday’s talk due to a family emergency. I was a bit conflicted since I would have liked him to finish a bit earlier in order to have time for lunch, but on the other hand, I loved every minute of the talk. Of course, some of it was just being green with envy for his job! He does have me out looking over video cameras for astronomical use after seeing all the cool things he can do. And his talk rings true with my experience of lunar imaging—it’s absolutely the case that the best lunar images I have ever taken were composites assembled from webcam video.

I sat through the Canon DSLR panel discussion/Q&A which was okay—plenty of good information, no slight to the panel members, it just was not such a good fit. Since after Ron Dantowitz’s talk I’m looking at video cameras, I sort of wish I had gone to the talk on using the Meade DSI.

Last was Robert Reeves’ talk on webcam astrophotography which was another hit with me, although I wouldn’t have attended had Rick Feinberg, who was to give another Pro-Am collaboration talk, been able to attend. I picked up both of Reeves’ more recent books (I already had Wide-Field Astrophotography) and his talk covered the same general topic as his Introduction to Webcam Astrophotography book. All of the discussion re-emphasized areas where I realize I have been lazy—insuring good collimation, patience on imagings, matching focal length to sensor size, and more. The collimation is something I only recently learned to do with my Mak-Cassegrain and has certainly improved theviews. I’ll have to go home and get out the webcam now, after applying some of the other tricks discussed in the talks.

Overall, a great conference, and I’ll almost certainly return next year.