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An inexpensive CMOS colour video camera that is primarily intended for use as an autoguiding camera or as a planetary imager. This lightweight camera weighs about the same as a small eyepiece and is powered simply through its USB connection to a computer. It was acquired is an experiment to see how it performs for outreach use with the Vixen R130Sf Newtonian. That telescope is not really designed for planetary work and so the camera needs to serve as a deep sky imager.
Deep sky imaging entails fairly long exposures and that usually requires autoguiding. But autoguiding is not practical for outreach purposes due to the lengthy calibration lead time each time a different target object is chosen. Therefore the camera needs to run unguided. In such a case it is essential that the mount is properly polar aligned. Experiment shows that when the SkyWatcher EQ3 mount is used exposure times cannot realistically exceed 2 minutes. But if the SkyWatcher HEQ5 Pro mount is used exposures in excess of 4 minutes are quite viable. The camera is not cooled but its accompanying software includes an automatic dark frame subtraction feature and so eliminates any problem of electronic noise. |
Comparison with a 1.5 inch eyepiece to show how small this camera really is.
The bundled camera control software ToupSky is quite spohisticated allowing (among other things) real-time dark frame subtraction and individual colour channel histogram adjustments during image capture . Also the software allows snapshots to be taken of images once they are captured and these can be futher adjusted so as to enhance the viewer's experience during an outreach session.
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