Hi guys, I hope you are well. I just would like to introduce you my project to create a highly portable EEA instruments.
To explain the historic of this project, I must say that I am doing astronomy nearly exclusively visualy.
I had tested so much scopes to find the ones that fits my needs : Dobson (18"), big refractors (150 to 180mm of aperture), small refractors, Mak Newton, Maksutov, SC, unusual optical system (Clavius 166), and so on... But never find the right instrument, sometimes I have aperture fever and sometimes I want portable system.
However I always had this frustration to do not access to deep sky objects, and even in dark sites with large aperture looking at faint nebulae, galaxies was a bit frustrating (gray cloud).
That's why I was interested by new products like Unistellar or Vianis scopes. I tested one eVscope for several months and it was a great pleasure and easy to use. But as experienced user, I already had my own materials and scopes and it was a bit frustrating not to benefit of my large aperture to get the full benefits of the CMOS sensitivity.
That's why I decide to work on a projet where I could get same functionalities but in a very portable system (don't want to bring big camera, computer, big power tank, table, chairs, ....) and continue to use my own astronomy materials and scopes.
It takes me nearly one year to get a fully functionnal item and I am very pleased to show you my first prototype and get your feedbacks, critics and idea of improvment.
So what is exactly Astrowl ?
It is a very portable system using a very sensitive IMX462 sensor, integrated a 4" display and manage lot of realtime imaging processing. You connect through wifi (using a browser) to the Astrowl box and can change lot of parameters to be able to catch sky objects. With attached pictures you will see what the box looks like, what the browser interface looks like and some first samples of sky objects.
There are two main modes : live and stacking.
In live mode you can modify camera parameters and get up to 1sec of exposure. You see in realtime deep sky objects, you can change gain, saturation, contrast, ...
In stacking mode, you will get the best of the Astrowl box, you will stack pictures, virtually getting more and more long exposure, benefit from autoaligning frames, applying some filters (sharpen, denoise, ...) and even increasing red, green or blue stack.
And at least you can save the live or stacking pictures you can see on the 4" display and download it.
The Astrowl box prototype is packaged in a 3D printed plastic box.
My attached pictures were taken under a very light polluted sky and with a not so good tracking precision. So I am pretty sure that you can get far better results under good sky and with good tracking.
I am very impatient to get your feedbacks.
The well know Orion Nebula with a short exposure of nearly 5 seconds and 7 stacked images. Could greatly improve by pushing the stack numbers.
Edited by watchever, 15 April 2022 - 08:56 AM.