When we purchased our Meade LX200 GPS scope, it came with a lot of accessories. One of which was the Deep Sky Imager (DSI). The DSI is a special-purpose CCD camera designed for astrophotography. When the original owner purchased the unit, it cost over $300. He never used it. In fact, it looked like it had never been taken out of the box.
We thought that since we wanted to take it with us on the Columbus Day Weekend trip, we should get the the DSI set up and do some trial runs now. We also realized that since it required a PC to drive it, this would be a perfect task for one of our really old, but perfectly serviceable ultra-slim Sony laptops.
It has been a while since we installed any software on a Windows 98 machine, but the Meade software installation was relatively pain-free. We did run into some confusion when we got a dialog about some bizarre communcations error. We just ran the installer again and it completed without problems the second time around.
The software is pretty "techie," but we think we can muddle through it. We did manage to get the camera to be recognized by the software at the first try...which is a big deal in the Windows world. The specs on the camera are pretty low by today's standard, but we are still eager to see what kind of images we can get with this DSI. The sensor appears to be working, but we should really do a daytime test to confirm the quality of the image. We'll post more soon. [Permalink] - Meade Deep Sky Imager Installation
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