The name for this project comes from the Wide Angle Search for Planets or SuperWASP project. As you can guess it is used for hunting exo-planets.
If you look at the SuperWASP site you will see an impressive imaging array comprising 8 Canon 200mm f#1.8 lenses with their associated Andor CCD cameras all sitting on a massive torus fork mount - certainly very nice gear!
Living in the U.K. we have a major problem to contend with trying to pursue our hobby - the weather. There are very few good clear Moonless nights to take those perfect images. I have also compounded the problem by moving from a very fast (Hyperstar) imaging system that worked at f#1.85, to a much slower refractor-based system working at only f#4.5, i.e. six times slower.
I’m going to tackle this problem piece by piece and I will be posting details of my thoughts in the mini-WASP Array category. You can also see a list of the posts below:
- The mini-WASP array morphs into the NIP, November 6th, 2008
- mini-WASP Array Project - Part 3 - The Framework , December 8th, 2007
- mini-WASP Array Project - Part 2 - A Likely Solution, August 7th, 2007
- mini-WASP Array Project - Part 1 - The Problem, August 2nd, 2007
- mini-WASP Array Project, July 10th, 2007
I hope you’ll keep reading as I learn about what is needed and my experiences of putting together such an exciting piece of equipment.
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