Cheap planetary cam

[Camelopardalis]

Folks,

I've been doing some reading about Raspberry Pi as I'm interested in getting one to drive my mount.

Something else caught my eye though while browsing a vendor site. Last year they released a 8MP camera for the RPi with the Sony IMX219 sensor with 1.12 micron pixels and it's reasonably priced - around $40 (plus the price of the RPi of course).

Anyone got any thoughts as to why this wouldn't work as a relatively inexpensive planetary camera? I haven't found any of the more telling specs on the sensor yet (like sensitivity or such), but I reckon it'd be well suited to a f/6 scope or thereabouts :shrug: shove it on a 1.25" barrel and you're away.

Just a thought...

Cheers,
Dunk

[JA]

Hi Dunk,

There is not much in the way of perfomance data or specs on the unit, but in the dpreview article linked below they say that the new 8MP sensor has improved low light performance compared to its predecessor. Further down the page in the user comments to the article section, one user states, "I have the original Pi camera (5MP), and it sucks tremendously. It's so noisy and insensitive that I never bothered to do anything with it after initially testing it out."

https://www.dpreview.com/news/2487602384/raspberry-pi-updates-camera-board-with-8mp-sony-imx219-sensor

Anyway you never know for certain until you try these things for yourself, but the tiny pixels, don't augur well. What about using a more conventional guide camera for your mount, say a ZWO, QHY or Orion SSAG,etc ? Sometimes these can be had for a reasonable price used.

Best
JA

[Camelopardalis]

Yeah I'd seen plenty about the old one being really bad, but have to say I'm curious about the newer one, after all it is a Sony sensor and only 5 less than a 224 :lol:

The tiny pixels should be bolstered by being back side illuminated. For the price, it might be worth the experiment. I was interested in a project that I might actually use :D