For those who may be interested....I spent tonight trying out an ATIK
16 cam as a guide cam....it's a cooled CCD cam with an "st 7 " sized
chip...tho a sony chip and it's got the "built in" relays connexion
and cabling to allow autoguiding as "direct connect" with the
supplied cable. The BIG NEWS is this camera brand new is UNDER $ 700,
including everything needed to either image or autoguide...( well
everything EXCEPT a scope,mount, laptop
) and is USB 2... the
actual chip uses 7.4 mike pixels which provides excellent resolution,
and is 659 x 494 pixel count array. At 7e- electron volts...the read
noise is negligable.
There are 2 issues that may bother some folks....there is NO
shutter...so the first exposure taken requires covering the scope
objective to obtain the dark frame....I did it once and was good for
the rest of the 4 hour session. the second "issue" or what I thought
to be an issue before using the cam "was" a 3 second download time
for full frame image....this turned out to be ZERO ISSUE using my A/P
900 gto that was only aligned using the bore scope. I used 3 second
guide exposures and my main imaging platform was an FCT 100 at F
4.6....uhhh about 460mm
focal length.
I used this cam as guide cam connected to an FS102 Tak this evening
and at ~ 800 mm F 8 the Atik provided 1.87 arc/sec per pixel
sampling...
BETTER than needed 8) with a field of view about 20.5 x 15.4 arc
minutes....PLENTY of space for multitudes of guide stars
I took several images of M 101 that I'll post up later today.... each
image was 30 minute sub exposure and the stars look FINE to me
Personally, I gotta say for the price...this cam beats the SHORTS off
the ST-7/402 cams !
Broose
