Live Broadcast Highlights

On Tuesday night we did the first live broadcast with an Atik Infinity camera. All of us here at Atik would like to say a big thank you to everyone who tuned in, watched the recording and helped spread the word. We had some great questions and suggestions come in through the chat, along with some rather amusing commentary. We’d also like to thank you for your patience and understanding – it was a real live unscripted broadcast, and yes, a couple of things may have gone a little wrong.

“the other up!”

We used the same set up as with the very first tests with the camera – Celestron C6 Nexstar with a reducer on an alt-az mount, operating at around f/8. This kind of set up is useful to see how the camera can be used without particularly high-end equipment, but unfortunately this time things didn’t go quite so smoothly.

The broadcast was plagued by tracking and alignment errors, and although I’m sure no one will deny that this is all too often a part of astronomy, we’ll hold our hands up and admit we also had a rather hasty set up.

The initial idea had been to do the broadcast Wednesday night, if at all, but with an ever cloudier forecast, we took a gamble and decided to push things forward a day and just go for it. There was still some high cloud around throughout the broadcast, but the weather largely played ball. It was our gremlins that didn’t…

Live broadcasting is a really exciting aspect of video astronomy with a lot of potential, and since announcing the Infinity with its live broadcast integration, we’ve been wanting to try our hand at it. With our general background in astrophotography, being live on air is new territory for us all, and although things could have gone smoother, we hope it still provided an inkling of the stunning views that can be had with this camera.

We’ve put together a short collection of some of the highlights of the session so you can see all the good bits minus some of the more distracting issues.

We can’t wait to see what you can all do with the camera when we send out the first batch at the end of the month. I have more than a sneaking suspicion you’re going to do very good things.

Want to see more of the Infinity? We’ll be demonstrating the Infinity at Kelling Star Party this weekend (11th-13th September).

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