General Details
I have had this camera for some months now but I only recently managed to used it for astronomical purposes. It uses the sony ICX445 EXview HAD CCD B&W sensor with an active resolution of 1280×960 pixels. It has a square pixel size of 3.75 ?m which is ideal for lunar imaging with my 8″ Newtonian, as it gives the following image scales:
@ f/6 : 0.64 arcseconds/pixel
@ f/12 (2x barlow) : 0.32 arcseconds / pixel
@ f/18 (3x barlow) : 0.21 arcseconds / pixel
It can capture 8 bits per pixel (256 shades of grey) or 16 bits per pixel (65534 shades of grey – however the specification states that the camera has an Analog Devices 12-bit ADC so it would be 4095 shades of grey) of information per pixel, although I almost exclusively use it at 8 bits per pixel. I will do a comparison in the furure and report any possible benefits, although I doubt there are any for lunar imaging.
As you can see in the picture, compared with a DMK camera, the PGR camera is very tiny.
which is good considering that it is extremely lightweight.
On my last imaging session I captured these pictures using my 8″ Newtonian operating at 2400mm FL (using a 2x barlow)
which are good considering the average seeing conditions and the low elevation of the moon, which was at 30 degrees altitude.
Image aquisition / software
The camera comes with the “flycap” software that is able to fully control the camera and capture images / videos. I do not particularly like it but it is adequate. One feature that I do not like is the video capture process. I must press “F9″ to start and stop the video capture which always gives me trouble when using my macbook. I use k3ccdtools in order to control the camera which is far more user friendly. I have also downloaded the “firecapture” software which an alternative solution for controlling the PGR Chameleon camera, but have not yet tried it in the field. I will come back with an update once I’ve used it.
I also noticed that at some random points some frames are “up-side-down” when inspecting the captured videos. I will investigate further why this happens. It seems to happen when the data channel (usb 2.0) is struggling, but it does not really affect the processing using avistack or registax, as these can be easily eliminated.
Usage as an autoguider
In short, do not try this. The camera works exceptionally well for short exposures while imaging lunar or planetary details but has very (very) high noise when capturing 1-2 second exposures. Compared to the DMK, it has significantly more noise when used in long exposures ( > 0.5 seconds). I have managed to use it the first time I tried it, but I will not try this again.
Overall, I am very happy with the camera and I consider it a very good value for money purchase. The “wide field” of 1280×960 pixels gives nice lunar views without the need to take multiple videos and combine the results in a mosaic, which is typical for a 640×480 sensor.