Note: As of December 12, 2005 the full version is available for free
Ron Wodaski's Visual Calculator for Matching Telescope and Camera. This is a freeware version of a Visual Basic program developed for the book «The New CCD Astronomy».
The program has lists of telescopes and CCD cameras that allow you to pick a combination and evaluate its performance.
The left side (see screen shot) allows you to pick equipment from lists, or to customize the equipment parameters (focal ratio, Barlow/reducer, pixel size, bin mode, etc.) - also displays the image scale, field of view and other useful information.
The right side of the program shows the field of view of the camera/telescope combination. This gives you instant visual feedback on the usefulness of your selections.
No help file is available for this version, but the interface is fairly simple - pick a telescope, pick a camera, and evaluate the results visually.
This version has fewer reference images than the full one. It nevertheless retains all the features you need to make useful comparisons with different setups. You can use the program to learn about image scale and to assist you in deciding what cameras will work well with a given telescope.
