Posts Made By: Maurizio Di Sciullo

Wes,

Gorgeous resolution! The only caveat (which others have noted), is the slight, super-high SF ringing due to their hard processing. In all, I consider that to be a minor issue in the face of the exceptional resolution you've obtained.

Good shootin' Tex!

Maurizio

Chris,

I'm not sure why you've narrowed your search to SBIG, but allow me to offer the following thoughts. First, Starlight Xpress has a new camera out called the SVX-H9, which is an improvement to their HX-916, and HX-516. The detector is Sony's new "x-view" series, which has the smooth frequency response of their older Hyper HAD chips, but now has improved red, IR, and UV response. The icing on the cake is that the detector has a real-world 65% QE, up from Sony's older 45% value. I have a lot of experience with Sony chips, and find their output to be very easily balanced in a tri-color imaging program. Sony has a different philosophy from Kodak in their detector's response curve, and the validity of that philosophy can be seen in the many "webcam" typ cameras which all use Sony chips. The bottom line is that their natural (with respect to the human eye) response curves make for natural color reproduction. I'm not saying that Kodak doesn't, just that Sony seems to have taken some engineering steps which facilitate it.

The SVX-H9 sells for about $2,800 at Adirondack Video Astronomy. Combined with a filter wheel, adapters, RGB filters, and miscellaneous, and you're at about $4,000. The camera uses USB 2.0 for fast downloads of about 4 seconds in full-frame mode (about 1.5 seconds binned). This means that in binned mode (13.6 micron pixels), you've got a real-world planetary camera in your hands, as well as a good deep sky machine. Read noise is extremely low, and the camera is so clean in general that you can take long exposures with the cooler *OFF*, and still have amazingly clean frames.

In short, I have a lot of experience with CCDs in general, and this type of camera in particular, and I think that you would have a powerful tool in your hand for a reasonable expenditure, should you decide to go with it.

Best,

Maurizio Di Sciullo