Cookbook cameras were the main theme at this meeting held Saturday August 20 at our home. Nelson Chow was the featured presenter, who brought his recently operational TC 245 camera which we were able to demonstrate later in the evening. Nelson has taken liberties with the original Berry design in order to substitute thermo-electric cooling for the liquid system. This permits the system to be more self- contained with no need for the cooling reservoir and tubes. We look forward to a an article (or two or three...) describing his experiences in these pages sometime soon!

We also were fortunate to have two special guests: Dave Petherick and Brian Colville from the South Simcoe Amateur Astronomers. Dave has been building the TC245 cookbook camera sticking close to the original recipe. He gave us a detailed look at the various parts and steps involved in his construction effort. A number of questions and tips were exchanged between Dave, Nelson and the group.

I showed some slides of image processing with Aldus Photostyler SE on a set of images taken by Dan Driscoll with his ST6 camera. The camera software can save images in the TIF format, which is a common image processing format. Brian Colville brought along his CCD images of the SL9 impacts on Jupiter taken through the 12 inch Questar at U of T's Scarborough campus. We displayed them on the computer screen and, later, in the unstructured part of the meeting, experimented on them with Photostyler effects.

Nelson demonstrated his camera indoors by using my C5 which I set up at one end of the dining room and focused at the upper corner of the far living room where we had placed our Jupiter target. The image appeared on the computer monitor and we were able to save it in a FITS format. FITS is not as common as TIFF but is the only other choice other than the native format which is unique to the cookbook camera software (at least until other packages appear on the market to support it). The software provided by the cookbook is aimed at or focuses primarily on image capture.....

CCD IMAGE LIBRARY via BBS

The search for a reasonably priced used 386 machine has not turned up any bargains when there are new 486/33 budget machines available for about $1000. The executive have decided to defer the purchase of a machine for now and in the mean time Bob Sandness has graciously let us use his old 286 AT class machine. Norm ("PC Doctor") Folkers has refurbished it and picked up a cheap but adequate mono monitor. We have two small 20Meg hard disks which will do for a start although the older drive makes a constant droning noise (compared to modern IDE drives). When asked to work this drive also sounds like an 18 wheeler driven by someone with a learners permit! I have temporarily set it up in my house to test the BBS configuration. Jay Yang provided the shareware Remote Access BBS package which we had been trying to run from an XT machine which I now have installed on the AT. Jay and I will continue to test using a 2400 baud modem on loan from Andreas. Later when it goes "live" we will buy a 14400 baud modem.

ST4 WIDE ANGLE VIEW

Norm Folkers has given us a small super 8 movie camera lens, f/1.9, which can fit into the barrel of the ST4 camera. I recently took it over to Dan Driscoll to see if we could devise a way to mount it in such way that the focus can be quickly adjusted. I also wanted to see if it would focus at all because the CCD chip is set below an optical window and the lens seems to have a very short focal length. We cobbled together some wood and electrical tape and tried imaging some distant terrestrial sources, and managed after a lot of fiddling to get a picture of distant apartment buildings (see figure 1). From this picture we predict a field of view of almost 3 degrees square. We also obtained an interesting but somewhat puzzling image (figure 2) -- can you identify what it is?