Look at what I found .... a 10" f/2.5 schmidt astrocamera complete with ccd chip

[Ian Robinson]

And you all thought that since Celestron abandoned their 5" and 8" schmidt camera you'd have to wait for someone to die to get one secondhand.

Think again .... http://www.astrotechengineering.com/pdf/DSC-brochure.pdf

Very nice , bet they come at very nice price.

[Gama]

You need to look under the carpet to find most bugs..
Lets do that shall we ..

Yes, it is a great setup, and brings back memories of the old "Centurian 18" Purely dedicated CCD telescope.
But where they differ is, as the heading says... Schmidt optical system.
The problem is that the Schmidt produces a curved field, so unles you have a ccd sensor that also has a curved shape, it will start to produce issues as the size of the sensor is increased. I beleive this is why they went for a small sensor, i never read the whole product info.
Changing the optical shape here and there may help a little, and maybe they did this, im not sure.

But it is easy to convert a flat CCD chip into a curved CCD chip.
But that method uses a Ball Pen hammer, and there hasnt been a succesfull conversion yet.. Maybe you can be the first ?.. Maybe NOT !.

Theo

[Suzy_A]

The way they get around it is to waste most of the light - it only has a 1.4 MP CCD that is 9 x 6.7 mm.

A 10" schmidt camera should produce a far larger image - at least the size of 35 mm film, if not larger. From memory, the 8" celestrons use to take a single piece of 35 mm (ie 1 single frame cut off a roll) on a curved holder. You could however also cut a bit of film from 120 (70 mm film) and use that if you made up your own curved holder and it would still cover the whole thing.

[Ian Robinson]

Yep ...

Unless they incorporate a field flattener lens , no mention of one .

Still looks like a nice bit of kit, but not one I'll be buying.

[Satchmo]

I have a little used mint condition 5" F1.65 Celestron Schmidt camera on the shelf. I better get it in the trading section before I encourage myself an early passing :)