APUS

In the last few years, an interesting and exciting development has occured in astro-imaging. The use of inexpensive webcams have now been able to capture impressive views of planets and deep sky objects. A camera costing less than $200 plus software that is usually shared as freeware has allowed these camera to compete with CCD cameras costing 10 times as much. However, the very small size of the imaging chip makes it impossible to adequately capture extended nebulae objects with the most common telescopes. In addition, the advantages these chips have in capturing planetary detail is limited because the pixels are not small enough. To solve these problems, Optec has developed the APUS SCT set of WebCam Adapters.

The APUS SCT set is comprised of two adapters. For extended objects, the APUS SCT 0.36X (f/3.6 with a f /10 SCT) gives the largest unvignetted field for use with a SCT class telescope. For planetary imaging, the APUS SCT 2.50X (f/25 with a f/10 SCT) gives the optimal focal ratio for capturing all the detail. This set has been optimized to partially compensate for the aberrations associated with the SCT class of telescopes and give better performance compared to simple achromat that are usually adapted for this use by amateur astronomers.