New Camera UK Exclusive

[red dwalf]

was there a rough idea of price on this ?

[catman161]

Sorry for stupid question but what kind if camera is this, a webcam?

Also what kind of scope can this camera be used with?

[Brantuk]

"it's CMOS, not CCD, but it's next generation Sony IMX035 CMOS exmor sensor. and is 1.3 megapixel. It also has a 32 megabyte sdram buffer built into the unit to smooth things out a little"

Felix - the spec suggests it's better than a webcam (CCD) and a strong competitor for the DMK range of retail cameras that offer higher speed recording for a starting price around £400. It can be used on any scope that has tracking ability. If it's priced right it will have a strong presence at upcoming star parties I'm sure

[catman161]

Oh right. Thanks for that Kim. That was something else I was wondering-can you mount any scope on to motorised mounts? Like for example if someday when I've learnt a but more I fancied putting my 200p onto a goto mount is it possible?

[Brantuk]

Yup - the 200P would sit nicely on my NEQ6 Pro (the white one you saw). All you need is a set of the right sized tube rings and a sturdy dovetail plate and you're in business. Depends what you're imaging though - planets are achievable on alt/az motorized mounts with webcams - but for dso's you need a beefy equatorial mount and a different type of camera (dslr or astro specific ccd's).

[catman161]

Oh right, that's cool. Thanks Kim so in future I could possibly think about that. I think that will be a long way off though. Firstly I want to get more aquatinted with the night sky and also save up a lot of money!!

[Brantuk]

You're hooked now Felix - whenever a newbie starts talking about imaging or more aperture you just know they're well on the slippery slope hehe

[Craig]

Astronomy made me admit... Size matters. It was a painful admission!

[red dwalf]

never listen to women, it`s all about size and what you do with it L.O.L.

although a good sky makes a massive differance, my first visit to Kelling was a massive eyeopener for me, things i had no hope of seeing in sandiacre were easily visable under those skies, i could see everything other people could see with scope apertures twice the size of my 6" sct although theres had alittle more detail.

[Guest AstronomyShed]

Just as an aside, ignore any reported manufacturer framerates of many astro cams as they get tested for the most part with a lens fitted and pointing at some item of interest in a well lit warehouse/factory, under those conditions this camera will hit 83fps, in real world however, and from experience, i've now had this thing hitting 63fps on the moon! Now the software gives two framerates for this, it tells you actual capture fps and disk write fps, which obviously is dependant on things like hard drive bus speed/performance, cpu, USB2 bus speed, and even the quality of USB cables. But I've had it 'writing' at 63fps at 640 x 480, now in real world, although this camera will do 1280 x 1024, the vast majority of the time you'd use it at 640. At 1280 the best i've had is about 15fps which, to be honest, is still good. On Jupiter i've had it doing 53 fps relatively easily.

What does this mean in simple terms? Well, due to jupiters high rotation speed, the sweet spot for imaging is a 90 second or so window before you'll get rotational error (slight blur due to planet movement) Now with the normal tool of choice, a webcam, that 'roughly' equates to 1000 frames, in any imaging, the more frames you can get, the more 'quality' frames average into the equation, this camera will hit the avi ceiling before you run out of time (90 seconds) as windows has an avi size ceiling of approx 2 gig (yes, the avi's are 2 gig!!!) Which equates to 'roughly' 2100 frames, so now you've already doubled your average with ease.

But it's not that simple!

The camera will shoot in tiff or bitmap too, which has no such ceiling, so you can, in effect shoot a folder full of tiffs instead, which now gives us a theoretical maximum of.... 4770 frames!!!

But it's still not that simple!

The camera also will shoot in RAW, meaning you have to debayer your footage before stacking (which is no big deal) BUT RAW frames are smaller in size, and I've got RAW avi's of 6000 frames here of the moon! The downside is that avi's of that many frames makes registax well and truly fall on it's arse!

But there's more!

The reason for those HUGE file sizes isn't just the higher number of frames, a webcam is 8 bit, this is 16 bit, what that means is that you have a much larger range with regards image, put simply, a hell of a lot more shades between black and white, so much so that previously, you'd be lucky to catch jupiter moons without burning out the planet disk, this catches them easily! Also, with a webcam image, normally with say one of the dark bands, it appears as just that, a dark band, with this camera you will see a wider range of detail and shading within those dark bands.

The drivers for this camera are still being further developed, as is the imaging software that comes with it, which, is actually already VERY capable and VERY simple, at least as simple as say sharpcap.

I see a great deal of future potential for this camera and I'm still discussing a pricing point, but one thing is for certain, this camera will be launched with an introductory price, I suggested this for the simple reason that it is obviously competing with the Imaging source, which dominates the market in planetary cams, QHY is an unknown entity in that market although established as a long exposure cam manufacturer. So watch this space

Regarding band detail and moons mentioned above, anyone in the UK will agree that we've had a long spell of very poor weather, this, isn't a great Jupiter, but then again, it was taken in up to 40mph gusts with a 200P, but look at the shading in the lower band this was a stack of approx 300 frames, the rest were buggered due to wind. (2x barlow) :-

Comapre that to this, which is possibly the best webcam Jupiter i've ever done :-

Below is probably the best close up lunar I've ever done and possibly ever will mange with a webcam:-

And finally, due to the very high frame rates of this camera, another subject comes to mind, here's one I did earlier with a webcam, when the opportunity arises I'll be revisiting it with this new camera :-

Oh, forgot to mention, due to the difference in the imaging chip size, it averages 1 barlow less than you'd need with a webcam, the closeup lunars in previous posts were done with a 2x barlow, for a webcam you'd need a 3x to get that sort of mag.

Edited January 8, 2012 by AstronomyShed

[Craig]

Those are fantastic.