During the afternoon of Mar 03, 2022, I took a first, quick peek at our new astronomical camera. This is a ZWO ASI6200MM full-frame, CMOS device. It will be the first CMOS-based camera we use at the RIT Observatory -- we've always used CCD devices up to now.
The goal today was simply to open the boxes, look inside, and see if I could connect to the camera and take a simple image or two with the camera lying on the table. So, first step is to take all the small boxes out of the big mailing carton:
Inside the box containing the camera itself were a number of items, including adapters and cables.
Here's the camera itself.
There are two adapters: the first screws into the camera itself,
and the second screws into the first to extend it. Each has an outer diameter of 2 inches, and can be slid into the eyepiece holder/focuser on the back of the telescope.
The camera takes 12 volts of DC, drawing up to 5 Amps.
The filterwheel came with a set of LRGB filters. We won't be using these often, as we ordered a set of BVRI filters as well (they haven't arrived yet).
Note that each of these 2-inch-diameter filters is mounted in a metal ring; the name of each filter is printed on the ring.
Looking into the camera body reveals the star of the show: the full-frame CMOS sensor.
I connected the camera to my laptop and installed the camera drivers from ZWO. I then ran MaximDL and was able to connect to the camera without a problem. I took a sample image with the lens cap slightly ajar, to let a small amount of light into the camera. Binned 4x4, the image is still very large: 2394 columns by 1597 rows, for a total of 7.6 MBytes in 16-bit integer format. Yikes.
The image (and others taken at the same time) show a pattern of horizontal stripes.
A median slice taken vertically through the image shows a regular pattern with amplitude roughly 70 / 14000 = 0.5 percent and period roughly 20 pixels.
Last modified 4/04/2022 by MWR.