The future of Astrophotography camera chips?

[gregbradley]

CMOS has been developed further with the introduction of Scientific CMOS chips.

They seem to be quite a bit superior to their CCD counterparts. I can see being able capturing fainter details with one of these chips as the read noise is a fraction of CCDs.

Its early days and the first chip is only 5.5 megapixels but the low noise, high QE, fast frame rate with antiblooming could mean CCDs will have significant competition in the next few years.

If this line is successful we could see a future where CCDs are not so popular anymore.

http://www.scmos.com/

There is a downloadable paper on these chips if you are interested in reading more about it.

Greg.

[blink138 (Pat)]

that looks as though it will be amazing
interesting too that one of its possible uses will be in adaptive optics
pat

[gregbradley]

Yes they do look to be very promising. It probably will be some time before they make their way down to a dedicated astro camera.

I like the way they promote one use of the chip as Lucky Astronomy.
Not sure what that is exactly.

Greg.

[naskies (Dave)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

I like the way they promote one use of the chip as Lucky Astronomy.
Not sure what that is exactly.

I think they're referring to the max 100 fps frame rate, e.g. what the amateur planetary imagers do to get sharper images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_imaging

[Peter Ward]

Had a read of the link, in very low light CCD's are clearly superior, as well as having significantly better dynamic range (sCMOS are currently targeting 12 bit, ok, but not great ).

Also the elephant in the room is comparing 5-20 minute exposures (smear??? are you kidding? ) with 1-2000th of a second.

sCMOS looks the way in the latter... very likely to be planet-cam of choice in the future...but due the gate structure etc. overheads, it will take some very clever design to displace pure sensor pixel space as in CCD's

Very interesting post just the same

[Poita (Peter)]

I think this is what Jack Mallincam is using in his new planetary imager isn't he?