Fun with the Mintron, 140420

[philjay]

It was some years ago I got a Mintron enhanced video camera for probing just that bit deeper with DSOs in my scopes. It just helps pick out the fainter objects and shows you them in real trime on screen which really appealed to me at the time, and still does. In no way does it give coffee table book images, thats for the DSLR and cooled CCD cameras this is an observing tool and I used to use it a lot at this time of year for galaxy bagging plus taking the odd screen grab I could illustrate what I observed in my log.

 

So here are some of the things I saw last night with the Mintron on the Meade ED127T. I bagged the Leo triplet, M3, Eskimo and a few others but didnt bother with grabs.

 

So here is Comet Atlas, difficult visual due to high mist but very bright in the Mintron.

M51 was very bright. I actually got M81 and 82 on the chip at the same time but 82 got lost in translation, dunno what happened,. I shall try again later.

 

There are loads of artefacts in the images but they are not supposed to be POTM quality images

 and arent intended as such, they are illustrations of what can be seen on screen when observing with one of these cams and they are great fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[+RonC]

That looks like a handy bit of kit Phil, certainly does the job well!! 👍

[Brantuk]

I remember those Mintrons - loads of fun looking at stuff. 🙂

[philjay]

Its very versatile, I have an adapter to fit a pentax screw thread lens. I used a 0.5 reducer last night to give wider fields. I used to use it in a 127mak piggy backed on my C11 and fed it into guidemaster software, this combo was the the most accurate guiding I have ever done, vos it was guiding at f12 🙂

[philjay]

Aha, found it. II was using this set up at the 2011 SGL starparty in Hereford when a pro photographer (John Hicks) asked if he could take some photos. This was one of them, he had been commissioned to take some photos of someone with a telescope, this has appeared in Sky at Night mag and on their DVD quite a few times in the past. It shows how simple the rig is to use, Mintron with AV and power leads running to a capture card and into a lappy running capture software. When I first got the cam I ran it straight into a small telly, very simple but this way you can do screen grabs.

 

 

Oh the glass of red wine is not a requirement but is a nice addition, however I did alter that last night, I had a glass of white just to vary things :-)

[+Ibbo]

Good show Phil with the balanced diet.

[+Graham]

Nice work Phil.

You have some great shots there.

[Doc]

I used to have a Watec video camera. I spent more time looking at the computer screen then looking at the sky, hated every minute of it.

 

 

Edited April 15, 2020 by Doc