Night Seeing Monitor

NSM Night Seeing Monitor

The Night Seeing Monitor measures the seeing quality during long exposure astrophotography work. You can access at any moment to the following data:

– “long exposure” seeing in Arc-second.

– Stellar scintillation standard deviation.

– Clear night statistics.

The Night Seeign Monitor updates data every minute.

Presentation

Conceived upon scientific papers, the Night Seeing Monitor measures precisely Polaris position jitter several hundred times per second on a matricial sensor. Unlike other systems, the NSM doesn’t use the TDI reading of a CCD sensor. The NSM innovative design uses a fast E2V matricial sensor that provides a far better sensitivity to the star movement. Unlike a DIMM, is doesn’t require motorized tracking. Therefore you just have to attach the NSM on a solid support such as a concrete wall.

Easy installation

You can use the Night Seeing Monitor anywhere in northern hemisphery from 30° to 90° latitude. By default we configure the NSM for analysis in the green band for visible spectrum imaging. Nevertheless we can adapt it on order to other wavelength from 400nm to 1µm. Although we precisely focus the system during assembling, you can correct the focus if needed using a single hex socket screw.

The NSM needs only one provided Ethernet cable. An included PoE injector supplies the power through the provided 10 meters GigE Cat6 cable.

The NSM CNC machined aluminium assembly is all weather. A fork allows the precise alignment on the polar star with the help of the control software that shows you the position to aim at. In addition we can provide the NSM with an Intel NUC PC in option with all softwares installed and tested for you.

Results integration in your website and weather station connection

The Night Seeing Monitor software runs on Windows x64 and requires a GigE port and at least a Core i3 processor. The software automatically logs measures in CSV and PNG file and it may automatically upload the results to a FTP server for a simple integration in a web site.

A software module can control a Davis Vantage weather station and provide a weather data dashboard.

Specifications

You can see below the information of our NSM and Davis Vantage Pro2 in our observatory in Gréoux les Bains, France.

 

Seeing LE in ArcSec

Stellar scintillation (Std Dev in ADU)

Davis Vantage Pro2 dashboard on seven days