new flea3 planetary camera from PGR

[bird]

Ok, so I'm excited... after more than a years wait I've just received my new flea3 firewire camera from Point Grey Research...

I haven't tested it yet ( I guess I have to wait until it gets dark...) but the specs look very promising.

First impressions: it's *small*. I mean *tiny*. It's not much bigger than my thumb, seriously. I've attached some photos for you to see, including some comparison images with my DMK.

The lens mount is a C-mount, so that should give some idea of scale.

The vendors website is http://www.flea3.com

cheers, Bird

[gbeal]

Looks nice Bird, although I am convinced you could take my 100 year old Box Brownie and produce award winning shots.
Gary

[duncan]

Hi Bird,
Wow! That sure is small.Looking forward to seeing some results.
By the way have you ever tried any sort of Deep Sky stuff with the DMK.
I'm looking for opinions something for both P & DS Budget is $1000
Cheers,
Duncan
Ps to be used with my 150x1200 refractor & Heq5Pro

[Quark]

Strewth Bird, how small is that!!!

Doesn't look like it would it would produce anymore load on the focuser than the DMK. Looking forward to some images of Saturn & Jupiter with your new toy.

Regards
Trevor

[gregbradley]

That is exciting.

I look forward to your review as I am thinking about ordering one.

It may also double for as an autoguiding camera, small and fast frames and high resolution, fast downloads, low noise - what's not to like.

Greg.

[bird]

So far I've powered it up and confirmed that it works with my Linux capture program (Coriander), and I have the 16 bit data the correct endian-ness.

Bring on darkness!

Bird

[bird]

I haven't weighed it for sure, but it's much lighter than the DMK, probably less than half the weight.

cheers, Bird

[renormalised]

Got enough fleas here at home (there's a plague of them in parts of town), don't need anymore:):P

[renormalised]

58grams!!!!. You'd be more worried about the connector on the end of your cable causing more flex in your draw tube than the camera!!!

[renormalised]

I think it would make a great autoguider.

[bird]

Ok, first impressions from use on the scope...

The pixel size of the flea3 is 5.6 microns (same as the dmk), but different to my current dragonfly2 camera which has 7.4 micron pixels, this makes it tricky to compare the cameras, I have to change barlows etc and try to get the image scale equalised between the two cameras so that the image brightness can be properly compared.

I didn't quite succeed, so the tests were done with an image scale on the flea3 about 10% larger than the dragonfly2. This should mean that images will be a little dimmer than they ought to be.

But in any case, the flea3 has massive red sensitivity, at least 50% more than my current dragonfly2, maybe more than 50%. The green sensitivity is also higher, but not by as much, and the blue sensitivity is about the same between the cameras as far as I can tell, but again the slight differences in focal lengths in the tests makes it hard to be exact.

Another complicating factor was thin cloud that kept drifting through, again making it hard to get exact measurements.

But there's no doubt that I'm keeping this camera... the red sensitivity is amazing.

Just for laughs I switched to my ir742 filter, and at 30fps and a large image scale Saturn still showed quite a decent image, again very surprising.

The only downside at the moment is that my capture software (coriander) doesn't completely understand the flea3, so the gain slider refuses to go to more than about 60%. Thanksfully I can switch it to absolute mode and type in the max value by hand. I guess I have some hacking to do to get it working properly.

cheers, Bird

[Emil]

"Just for laughs I switched to my ir742 filter, and at 30fps and a large image scale Saturn still showed quite a decent image, again very surprising."

I told you so, the ICX618 really is a great sensor ;) I didn't know you ordered that camera a year ago though? You got some close contacts at Pt Gray or something?

I do have one little concern though; what about the heat consumption in such a small camera. My DMK21 can get relatively warm, and you can feel that on the outside of the camera. But the outside actually acts like a cooling block (aluminium, and nicely connected to the PCB of the camera so it actually draws out heat pretty nicely). I'm guessing the power consumption is probably more or less the same (?), and the heat has got to go somewhere. It might not make a worlds difference, but I would definately look into that.

Now GL with those clear skies :)

(ps. I'm a little bit jealous)

(ps2; start thinking about imaging Jupiter/Saturn in other longer wavelenghts. )

[Troy]

Good one Bird looking forward to your updates with this new camera. :eyepop:

"I didn't know you ordered that camera a year ago though? "

Hey Emil, I think it just seemed like a year :lol:

[trick]

Bird you mentioned a years wait? not from it being a backorder I hope, just getting your finances together?

Price shipped to Aus = ? Disregard now found the price on the web site just having a blonde day

[riklaunim]

ICX618 is red-oriented as those webcam-ish CCDs are green-oriented to mimic human eye sensitivity and color balance, so you get massive sensitivity boost at red and IR. Look at the attachment - it's even better than ICX285 from cams like Atik314, DSI III Pro (relativity taken from the max sensitivity in mV per square pixel micron numbers). ICX424AL from Dragonfly 2 (and others) would be slightly better than ICX098.

I'm thinking about convincing my local astroshop to do a test of Baader methane filter when I get the Basler Ace.

[bird]

I started looking for a new camera a year ago... first I wanted the "new" grasshopper2 camera from PGR, but after waiting about 6 months while that sat on the "upcoming products" page it got canned... fallout from the global financial meltdown.

So I was back to square 1, and still with no new camera and then I heard about the icx618ala and asked PGR who sai that it was coming in their new Flea3, that was about a month or so ago :-)

cheers, Bird

[bird]

The red sensitivity is amazing. It's a shame the blue end is not as much of an improvement.

Emil, the Flea3 does get warm, not a problem for use outside in the cold on a scope, but I would hesitate to put one of these in a closed box without extra cooling.

cheers, Bird

[bird]

I've posted this elsewhere, but this is the first image from the flea3 camera...

cheers, Bird

[riklaunim]

Well it should be 2x in blue, 1,8x in green and 3x in red. The blue may also suffer from seeing.

[bird]

could be right with those numbers, thin clouds tonight make it hard to get any real numbers.

ps Trick I paid about $AUS750 all up, PGR charge $US595 for the camera and $US100 for shipping which is a bit steep, but on the other hand they shipped it last friday by fedx and I got it today.. I'm happy to pay for that :-)

cheers, Bird

[riklaunim]

I have the Star Analyser grating so I'll be able to compare that sensitivity on a planet :) The raw spectrum will be affected by the spectral response of the CCD. DMK and Saturn below show the green sensitivity peak while Saturn isn't green.

[Paul Haese]

For me several things are important. Well depth, pixel size, frame rates at native size and noise levels. I am largely unconcerned with weight as the Skynyx is probably the heaviest camera getting around and that barely even impacts on the mount.

I also wonder about noise and heat with this camera given its size. Would the heat build and create noise? (this is a rhetorical question; no need to answer as we will know soon enough) For me having 12 bit or more and low noise is going to make a far greater impact in good seeing.

I look forward to seeing your results and we will no doubt talk about this later.

[iceman]

Very very interesting. It's much cheaper than I expected too.. and with the AU$ so high against the green back, now is a good time!

[bird]

Paul, the camera has the potential to run hot, but outside on the scope this morning it was only warm to the touch in ambient temps of about 9C.

It got a lot hotter inside the house on the test bench yesterday.

But the results on the scope for temperature are about the same as the dragonfly2, I guess the smaller size of the flea3 makes it more noticeable. Might be an advantage though - we can get heavy dew and ice here esp. in winter and at least that might be kept away from the sensor by the warm running temp.

cheers, Bird

[riklaunim]

Warm CCD shouldn't be a problem if you are imaging planets but for longer exposures it may add some additional noise. DMK21 at 11,5 sec needs a good dark (and I was imaging 81P comet at 11,5 sec exposures). For long exposures (planetary nebula, comet hunting?) sticking a peltier unit on the housing shouldn't be a problem (peltier, radiator, fan and more cabels :)) For shorter nice cooper radiator and some silicon termoconducting glue should help if needed :)

[Paul Haese]

As you know Anthony we have spoken about the possible issue of noise generated from the heat of these camera's despite the short sub exposures. I am still wondering if cooling these cameras will dramatically improve the performance and increase signal further. I cannot see why not and once I get my new camera I will be experimenting on the skynyx to see if there are any possibilities.

Yes the reduction of ice and dew on the unit is necessary of course but with a small peltier on top of it this would happen anyway. Food for thought. I can feel an experiment coming on.:thanx:

[bird]

Ok, I've heard back from PGR about something I noticed on the Flea3, I didn't want to say too much before checking with them in case this interesting behaviour was going to somehow "go away" in future, but they seem happy enough with it.

The Flea3 officially supports gain values from -2db to 24db, *but* this can be easily bypassed and gain values up to 33.2db are possible. The image is amazingly bright at 33.2db and the background noise is still very low. This is a killer feature of the camera, but you need software that will know how to access this extra gain or else you'll see a limit of 24db.

Coriander under Linux supports the over-gain values as-is, and for Windows users I've emailed Torsten about adding support into Firecapture for it.

The way to access the exctra gain is very easy really - the camera control registers have two ways to set the gain, either a slider value from 0 to 762 that is mapped onto gain values between -2db and 24db, or using the "absolute value" registers where you write the actual gain value requested as a floating point number.

In the second case, using the absolute value register for gain its possible to input values up to 33.2 and the camera responds accordingly :-)

With the extra gain headroom this camera is far and away the best of any cameras that I've tested.

cheers, Bird

[Emil]

(psst; my dmk21 can go to +36db.. wanna trade?? ;))

[bird]

:-) yeah, my dmk can do that too :-)

In fact these gain values are pretty meaningless for trying to compare between cameras. For each camera this gain value is relative to the reference voltage fed to the a/d converter, but this reference is set wherever the designers want it, so 33db on one camera is not going to be the same as 33db on another camera.

I know you probably are aware of this already Emil, but maybe others here are looking at the gain numbers as something that can be used to compare between cams, but that's not right :-)

cheers, Bird

[Emil]

I definately was not aware of that.

Not a very scientific method, but once you have played around with a icx618 camera, you just know it is just really good. Simply comparing the final results will give a good indication of what it can do. In my case the only thing that changed was the ccd. And when the image was more than twice as bright in red, and even more in IR without an apparent increase in noise, I knew it was a keeper. I pretty much was convinced already by looking at Torsten Edelmans initial webcam modification.

pff.. it's cold outside, I shouldn't type that much. Currently imaging a Tethys transit, but Saturn is only 30 degrees above the horizon now :(

[Clif]

Bird:
I just got my Flea3 and so far I have managed to install the Firewire 1394b card and power up the camera. It shows up as a generic 1394 camera and I can take still images using the Windows utility, however, FlyCapture does not recognize that I have a camera, and when I try to associate any of the drivers in the driver folder they provided, I am told by Windows XP that they don't contain any information pertaining to my attached camera. Either I screwed up something in the software installation process, or else PGR does not include support for the new camera in their standard software package.
I notice that you have been using a Dragonfly2, and also that you use "Coriander" for capture. I wonder if it uses the same driver as your older camera? Maybe Coriander is just a smarter program than FlyCapture. Did you even try to run the camera with FlyCapture?
Clif, New Jersey, USA

[bird]

Cliff, I guess you have the latest PGR software package off their website - 2.0.15? That's what I installed under Windows and it works fine, flycap2 detects the flea3 ok.

If you can't get that to work then maybe lodge a support request with PGR, they are pretty good at helping out.

If you want to use Windows for imaging then you can use FireCapture to run the camera from Torsten Edelmann, it has support for the Flea3.

Coriander is a Linux application, I'd recommend that as much better than Windows if you want to give it a go :-)

cheers, Bird

[Clif]

Bird:
The disk came only with the older version, and for some reason, when I registered on the PG site, I was only cleared for documentation, not programs. They fixed that, and I downloaded FlyCapture2 and installed it. It detected the camera but still did not work. Turns out that I had installed service pack 3, and there is a bug in the windows 1394 driver. Fortunately, PG sent me a little utility to downgrade the driver to the working version that was in service pack 1, and now FlyCapture2 not only detects the Flea3, but I get a beautiful live video image from it with full control of the camera settings, codec, resolution, all the good things I need to do, plus a bunch I don't need. It will send raw undebayered Y8 codec also, just what I need for Registax to crunch.
So far, so good. Then I start looking for how to tell the program that I want to record a minute of video as an AVI file using all those great camera settings, and darned if I can see any way to do it. It finally dawns on me that Point Grey did not provide a real working program, but simply an example of a program that the user could create using the C++ source that they include with the installed package. There is even a piece of code that does save out an AVI file to the computer. Great! At least it would be great if I could program in C++. I don't even have a C++ compiler.
I was dismayed and disappointed to discover this. It seems very peculiar to me for a camera seller not to provide working software for their camera. I have heard on the LucamRecorder group that Heiko will be supporting the Point Grey cameras sometime this summer.
Know anyone who could lash on the save an AVI file code onto the code for FlyCapture2 and compile it for the rest of us? Otherwise I am waiting for Heiko.
Clif

[Clif]

Well, I got some great help from Oscar at Point Grey support. Turns out that release 23 of the older program FlyCapture 1.8 does in fact let me save AVI files from the Flea3. The GUI for the older program is not as cool as the one provided with FlyCapture 2.0, but it does have a built in save AVI file utility and the pgrcam.inf file supplied with it has the information needed to run the Flea3. I am still learning to use it, but it looks like I may actually get to use the camera, if the sky ever clears up.

The Murphy's law corollary for astronomy has really been working overtime in NJ. It has been cloudy since the new camera arrived and has been raining for the past two days now and no clearing in sight. Well, that will give me time to learn to use the software and make an adapter for the camera. The C-mount threads on the tiny 1" cube camera are machined on the inner bore of a 1/2" long 1.09" OD tube attached to the CCD side of the cube. I made a short split sleeve of 1.25" OD aluminum tubing which fits the outside of the C-mount of the camera. It holds onto the camera by friction and grips the camera when I tighten the screw on my eyepiece holder. Should work nicely. Looks like I have a big cable coupling stuck into my focuser. Where's the camera?

I understand that later versions of the compiled FlyCapture 2.0 program will include an AVI capture utility.
Clif

[sussenbachnl]

Hi Clif,
I have just received a Flea3 camera and am exploring the software to capture AVI's. I use Fire Capture of Thorsten Edelmann and would appreciate some suggestions which settings you are using as far as Gain and Gamma are concerned.
You mention thet release 23 of FlyCap 1.8 has an option to capture AVI's. Where can I find this release? It could not find it on the PGR site
Thanks in advance

John