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The Joint Astronomy Centre and East Asian Observatory have made a number of releases.

It was shut down in 2005 but the software continued to be developed at the Joint Astronomy Centre until March 2015, and is now maintained by the East Asian Observatory. CMOS technology continues to evolve, and this camera uses it in a new way to image the night sky.The Starlink Project was a long running UK Project supporting astronomical data processing.

QHYCCD’s 128C COLDMOS camera brings a new perspective to astrophotography. For example, each photo in this article was made with two or fewer hours of total exposure time. The gain of the camera can be adjusted to the f-ratio of your imaging device and the nature of your target.įurthermore, the camera is well suited to situations where you have only one night available for imaging. In line with this, the COLDMOS camera works well with a large variety of optical devices, from camera lenses and refractors to long-focal-length telescopes.
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(But you do need to know how to stretch and enhance raw data to get the results you see in this article.) The camera has limitations, of course, but if all you want to do is take some good color images of the night sky, you can do a lot with it. And dare I say it? This camera was also fun to use. It’s all done for you via the Bayer matrix. There’s no filter wheel, no complicated registration, and no combining of colors. Typically, I’ll set it for no more than one-half the maximum gain and exposures between 10 and 20 minutes, depending on the brightness of the target and focal ratio of the imaging device. I have applied the same concept to my COLDMOS exposures with good results.
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The core of the Orion Nebula (M42), for example, would be a pure white blob showing no detail.Įxperiments that I’ve done with a DSLR indicate that the CMOS chip performs best when I capture longer exposures at lower ISO settings. This means that anything bright will wash out, and there will be no data there.

Although the noise does not increase significantly, you lose deep-well capacity. If you increase the gain, you can take many short exposures and combine them. The 128C differs from CCD cameras in another huge way: You can adjust the gain (or ISO) of the chip. With a COLDMOS camera, you need to perform the combination yourself. In a DSLR, this happens internally, and you see the color image immediately. The magic comes via software that combines each color unit into a single point of true RGB color. Looking at a raw result from an exposure, you would only see various shades of gray and lots of little squares. The result is a new level of performance for imaging. These new devices feature a lot of advanced technology found in CCD chips, like double-correlated sampling and even back illumination. Over the last several years, Sony has been moving the CMOS chip design forward. QHYCCD, the camera’s manufacturer, named the camera COLDMOS because the CMOS chip is cooled during use, and to differentiate it from other types of cameras that use CMOS chips. The QHY camera features a 128-megabyte image buffer and USB 3.0 connectivity for fast and smooth downloads. This is a full-frame 35-millimeter chip with 6-micron pixels that can record a 24-megapixel image in 14 bits. The QHY 128C uses Sony’s IMX128 chip that Nikon uses in its D750 SLR. Would I be interested in trying one out? I was curious, so I said yes. In some of these cameras, the amplifier noise was less than expected.
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They also allowed you to download a RAW file as a FITS file, a big advantage for advanced imagers. The cameras had various CMOS color chips in them just like many DSLR cameras, but they were cooled like the chip in a CCD camera. At the 2017 Advanced Imaging Conference in San Jose, California, I couldn’t help noticing some shiny new cameras without filter wheels. There’s a new kid in town, and his name is COLDMOS.
