It's now been 13 years since I built my Cookbook 245 and it has been one of the most rewarding projects that I've ever completed. Since then I've spent countless evenings having a blast imaging with it on a Meade 10" LX200.  For more information on homebuilt Cookbook cameras visit Richard Berry's Cookbook Camera Home Page. You can also read an article that I wrote for Sky & Telescope Magazine on my experiences in getting started with CCD imaging using the Cookbook and the imaging techniques that I used.

For image processing I use AIP for Windows. One fun thing you can do with this software is take a series of Cookbook images ( provided that they are slightly under sampled ) and perform a "drizzle" stack on them by resampling the individual frames 2x and then aligning them to a sub pixel accuracy. The result is a more impressive 756 x 560 pixel image with a substantial increase in resolution. AIP's powerful Richardson-Lucy deconvolution routine can sharpen the result and color composites can be assembled from CMY or RGB filtered data. Three examples of this technique are shown below. My favorite is the image of M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy which also appeared on the cover of the first edition of "The Handbook of Astronomical Image Processing" by Richard Berry and Jim Burnell.

You can also check out my Cookbook 245 Image Gallery by clicking on the link below. These are the best of the Cookbook images I took between 1996 and 1999.  After 13 years of dependable service I no longer do any imaging with the Cookbook, but instead have modified the camera to be air cooled to enhance its "portability" and use it as an autoguider.