In the months following this camera's purchase the Covid-19 pandemic has prevented its actual use for outreach purposes. However home viewing is a good test bed for getting to grips with how to use both the camera and the image capturing and viewing software SharpCap. Thus the following screenshots show what viewers at an outreach session can reasonably expect to see once public viewing sessions are allowed to resume. Exposure times range from 15 seconds to 2 minutes depending on the brightness of the object being observed and seeing conditions such as light pollution and sky transparency. To reduce exposure times the camera's 2 x 2 binned mode has been used effectively doubling the size of the camera's 4.63 micron pixels up to 9.26 microns on a side. Of course that reduces the camera's native resolution of 4144 x 2822 pixels down to 2072 x 1411 pixels but even so that is plenty sharp enough for outreach viewing. For practical outreach work the smaller, portable SkyWatcher PDS 150 Newtonian must suffice. But for home use the larger pier-mounted Vixen R200SS Newtonian allows shorter exposures to be used.
Mounted on the 6 inch SkyWatcher PDS 150 Newtonian
Mounted on the 8 inch Vixen R200SS Newtonian
