Hello all,

This is Bill, the Founder of Dark Matters Astrophotography, and we just completed onboarding to the SkyGems service with our first imaging system, a CDK14 on an 1100AE mount, with the hot new Moravian C5A-100M camera. The system is hosted in the United States, in Animas, New Mexico under extremely dark B1-B2 sky conditions. Seeing at the site is fantastic on most nights, although we are in the North American Monsoon season in the region (June-September), so winds and rain can limit the number of nights we can image during these periods and can have an effect on sky quality.

We have the system priced lower during the Monsoon Season and plan to continue this. We have the system priced now at 60 points/hr for imaging requests, and this will increase after the Monsoon Season has completed to 80 points/hour. We are seeing fantastic data on clear nights though, with some images we have already sent to customers showing ₁.4-1.5" FWHM (and in some cases even better) with incredibly sharp stars.

In addition to servicing requests for SkyGems customers, we have numerous imaging projects and data sets that will become available on our site at darkmattersastro.com very soon. I will do my best to check in here on the forums as I can. Let me know if you have any questions about the system and I will do my best to answer them.

Thank you,
Bill Long
Founder, Dark Matters Astrophotography