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Re: (meteorobs) Video Camera Data

Hello Dave,

>        The remarkable thing about this camera is that it is rated a 
> 0.04 LUX (not a typo), and with a 48 mm aperture, I can see stars down 
> to 8th magnitude and satellites down to 7th magnitude and occasionally 
> fainter. The downside is that the ccd chip is only about 10 mm across 
> the diangonal and the field of view, even with the 135 mm focal 
> length, is only about 3 degrees. I'm playing with other optics to try 
> to find a combination that gives me a larger field of view and better 
> sensitivity.

0.04 is not _that_ extraordinary sensitive as you may think. Today's
video CCD cameras may have sensitivites of 0.01 lux or even below.
However, this figure alone tells you almost nothing about the behaviour of
the camera under dark night skies. It depends at what _wavelength_ the
camera is that sensitive! It will not help you much if that sensitivity is
reachend in the IR, since you can't enhance the night sky with an IR
illuminator. :-)

Recording stars of magnitude 7 or 8 is not bad, but that can be achieved
with many cameras given the tiny field of view of 3 deg. When I take an 
ordinary camcorder I get already down to 6 mag when zooming to the max.
You will not be able to regularly record meteors with this setup (again:
unless you are doing fireball patrol type of observations), since
99% of all meteors will be outside your field of view.

Best regards, 
Sirko 

--
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*  Dipl.-Inform. Sirko Molau                  *                          *
*  RWTH Aachen, Lehrstuhl fuer Informatik VI  *              __          *
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