| This software/hardware package consists of a planetarium/telescope control program, cables to connect your telescope to your PC or laptop, and a Lunar Planetary Imager (electronic camera) for displaying what the telescope sees on your computer screen and saving those images to print out later. There’s even an on-line imaging update available from Meade at this Meade Autostar Suite Update Site that will add NASA-developed “Drizzle" imaging technology to the Lunar Planetary Imager. The Autostar Software Suite portion of the package works with all current Meade LX200GPS and LX200R SMT (Smart Mount) telescopes equipped with the Autostar II hand control, plus any Meade telescope using a #497 Autostar hand controller (such as the ETX-90/105/125 Maksutovs, all LX90, and all LXD-55/75 scopes with Autostar). It can also be used with older non-SMT Meade GPS scopes made between 10/1/01 and 10/1/03. The package is not available for LX200 scopes made prior to 10/1/01 that did not have a GPS system and Autostar II hand control. The Autostar software integrates the telescope with your Windows-based PC or laptop computer for an enhanced range of performance features. It includes a planetarium program with a database of 19,000,000 stars and deep space objects to display on your computer screen. It includes all the standard planetarium program display and star chart-printing features for stand-alone use when nights are cloudy. In addition, if you connect the scope to your computer or laptop (using either the supplied DB-9 serial or USB cable), the program lets you click on objects in the sky map display on the computer screen and have your telescope automatically slew to those objects. You can also automatically generate Autostar Tours of favorite objects with a simple point and click. The software lets you control all Autostar functions from your computer or laptop. You can use it to create observing lists and download them to the Autostar for use in the field when you don’t have your computer or laptop with you. You can use it to control your telescope remotely via the Internet. “Talking Telescope" software (included) converts the Autostar text displays to synthesized speech and plays it through your computer speaker. And to keep your Autostar current, the Autostar Update program will download the latest comets, minor planets, satellites, tours, and firmware revisions over the Internet, including the exceptional “Drizzle" image processing software.
The minimum computer requirements for imaging with the LPI are a PC running Windows 98SE or better, with 64 MB of RAM, and 100 MB of free hard disk space. However, the minimum computer requirements for installing the Autostar Software Suite with Drizzle technology update are a PC with a Pentium II or better computer running at 400MHz or faster (a Pentium 4 operating at 2GHz is recommended), 98MB of RAM (512MB is recommended), 200MB of available hard drive space (1GB or more is recommended), a CD-ROM drive, and a USB 1.1 full-power port (USB 2.0 is recommended). The computer should be running Windows 98SE, ME, 2000, or XP (XP is recommended). IMPORTANT NOTE: At the present time, this software package is not compatible with the new Microsoft Vista operating system.
The package includes a Lunar Planetary Imager electronic camera. This electronic eyeball combines the power of an astronomical imager/autoguider with the simplicity of a web cam. It has a VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixel) color CMOS chip for sharp and detailed images. When connected to your laptop or PC, it puts a real time full-color display of the objects being observed onto your computer screen. With a magnification approximately equal to that of a 6mm eyepiece, the Lunar Planetary Imager is designed for imaging the Moon, lunar occultations, planets, star clusters, the brighter deep space objects, and terrestrial targets. It has nosepiece adapters that allow it to be used with any telescope with a 0.965" or 1.25" focuser. A parfocalizing ring lets you focus the Imager at the same point as a favorite eyepiece. With the eyepiece in your scope, center in the eyepiece the object you want to take a picture of and focus. Then, simply replace the eyepiece with the LPI, tweak the focus if needed (using the supplied Magic Eye software-assisted focusing), and shoot. The Lunar Planetary Imager has both manual and software-controlled automatic control of exposure times from 0.001 to 15 seconds (up to 450x longer than conventional web cams). It automatically takes multiple exposures and selects the best images. It can align multiple images and combine them into one improved image, either to save for display on a website or to print out later for display in home or office. The LPI also works as an autoguider for long exposure deep space photography with a 35mm camera or a CCD camera that does not have a built-in guiding chip.
“Drizzle" Technology: Originally developed by NASA for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Drizzle software program (which works only with Meade AutoStar-controlled telescopes) is available as a no-cost download from Meade at this Meade Autostar Suite Update Site. The Drizzle program corrects field rotation in long exposures, eliminating the need to polar align the telescope. Instead of just tracking and stacking images by following the movements of one star, the Envisage Software with Drizzle tracks and stacks images locked on two stars. This corrects for the image rotation that streaks the star images during conventional imaging if the telescope is tracking in the Altazimuth mode, or you have only roughly polar aligned your telescope in the Equatorial mode. Using this feature, you can do a quick alignment of your Meade telescope in Altaz, turn on the Lunar Planetary Imager, select Drizzle, and draw a box around each of two stars in the field. The software rotates each succeeding image before adding it to the final image, to overlay those same two stars in each succeeding image onto the two stars initially selected. The result is the accurate alignment of all stars in the final image, without showing rotational star trails.
When the object being imaged would normally call for a bigger chip camera, the astrophotographer can enable the “Extended View" and “Drizzle Resolution" functions of the Drizzle software, which can produce an effective 4.9 megapixel camera from the Lunar Planetary Imager’s 640 x 480 CCD chip, but only with Meade AutoStar-controlled telescopes.
Drizzle “Extended View" extends the field of view up to 2 times horizontally and vertically by automatically mosaicing the image. Once you take the primary image, the “Extended View" function of Drizzle automatically guides the telescope to the four corners of that image and takes additional images that are added seamlessly to the original. The automatically telescope moves in small precision increments, pauses to take an additional image, and then repeats the action to make a seamless mosaic. This increases the true field of view of the image from 640 x 480 pixels to 1280 x 960. It results in a final image that is nearly four times larger than the original. Drizzle is not simply enlarging the image as in interpolation. It moves the telescope which in turn moves the image across the CCD sensor to perform seamless precision mosaics.
The “Drizzle Resolution" function increases the image resolution more effectively than the more commonly used interpolation method. By taking multiple undersampled dithered shots of the object being imaged, Drizzle reconstructs the image at a higher resolution. To accomplish this, Drizzle moves the AutoStar-controlled telescope a small amount many times, taking an image at every stop, again and again reading out fractions of each pixel as each exposure is made and reconstructing the image from those fractional pixels. Using fractional pixels increases the image resolution. While the final image size does not change with finer settings, the final image will be sharper.
Combining the Drizzle “Extended View" function (effectively making a 2 x 2 mosaic) with the “Drizzle Resolution" function (which takes multiple undersampled dithered shots of the object and reconstructs the image at higher resolution), result in an image that measures 2560 pixels by 1920 pixels, or 4,915,200 pixels total. The uncompressed RAM file of the image (in FITS format) will be approximately 10 megabytes.
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