gregbradley
20-06-2010, 09:18 AM
I have had the following cameras:
Nikon D70 DSLR modified (by myself)
Canon 20D DSLR (modified by myself).
Nikon D70.
I should have chosen what was then the Canon 10D. The Nikon was
not too bad but had bad amp glow and Nikon RAW images are not trully raw. They apply a median filter to control noise. Overall a fun camera.
Canon 20D.
Wow, way more sensitive and cleaner than the D70. I modified a few of these. They are trickier to mod than the Nikon which was quite easy. The Canon has a few spots where things can go wrong when modifiying.
I took many nice images with this camera and I liked it a lot.
Images Plus became quite sophisticated and laptop control of the camera made it perform much like a CCD camera in terms of focus and framing and image acquisition.
CCD cameras:
SBIG ST2000XM (2001 chip)
SBIG STL11000XCM (one shot colour 11000 chip class 1)
SBIG STL11002M class 2
Apogee U16M 16803 camera class 1
FLI Microline 8300 class 1 mono
FLI Proline 16803 class 1 mono
Custom Scientific, Astrodon Ha,S11,O111, LRGB 50mm round,
Astrodon 1.25 Ha,LRGB, Baader 50mm square clear, LRGB, Astronomik type 11 LRGb 50mm square, Astrodon 5nm Ha, O111, S11 50mm square.
The ST2000XM was my first CCD camera after using a modified Nikon
D70 for some time and a modified Canon 20D as well.
At first it was disappointing and I preferred the DSLR. It was noisy, it frosted up, it seemed a tad fussy to setup. It seemed hard to do colour combine and get a decent colour. But that was mostly learning curve.
CCDstack, Astrodon filters, baking the desiccant, doing darks/flats all helped get some reasonably good images out of it over time.
Self guiding was a great advance though and I liked that a lot except when you wanted to do Ha imaging where it was next to useless.
Also occassionally I had to make the blue guide exposures longer as autoguiding would fail if the exposures were too short with the blue filter (too dim for the gudie star).
Overall a nice camera and I quite liked it in the end.
Next camera was the STL11000XCM one shot colour.
I liked this camera a lot and imaging was quite simple with it. Downside of one shot colour is colour noise in the dim areas and less Ha and narrowband sensitivity but it still would take Ha images quite well.
Self guiding was easy as there were no filters (except for Ha).
Overall a very nice and easy to use camera and lovely field of view and nice images from it.
STL11002M. A very classy camera. Looks nice, easy to use,self guiding is good, remote guide head makes it flexible if you want to do narrowband imaging. Whack it in and it goes well. Only complaint with it really was the lack of a memory buffer. It also does not have the driver in its memory so it boots up off the computer every time. If power or the computer or a bad cable interrupts the connection it needs to be restarted and you usually have to restart your CCDsoft program as well.Very very annoying and when you use an Apogee or FLI camera and it connects bang - instantly and stays running no matter what happens to your computer it makes that aspect of the STL seem very bad. Not sure if the STX is like the FLI and Apogee in this regard, I hope so as to me it is very important. It makes the camera less reliable. If you come out to your observatory after 4 hours only to find the camera disconnected for some reason like a cable got loose etc and it was disconnected it isn't fun. Happily this is not a common occurrence. But it is a big weakness of SBIG cameras (perhaps other brands as well) and a big plus for Apogee and FLI (and perhaps other brands as well).
Apart from that its a great camera. The internal filter wheel gets rid of another power and USB cable and the self guide means you don't need an autoguiding camera and scope and possible flexure problems. These were its best features. The camera is noisy however compared to FLI and Apogee and from what I read Starlight Express. Same chip different brand - bang 1/10th the noise. So SBIG is the market leader but perhaps has been sitting on its laurels whilst other makers try harder and get better supporting electronics.26 seconds to download a 1x1 image was also quite slow.
Overall I really liked my STL11. Both the STLs had vertical lines in them
(the chip not the camera maker). These would sometimes show through in processing images even though they should dark subtract out. Something to keep in mind with that family of chip -full frame type).
Apogee U16M.
A lovely camera. Looks nice, its compact. Everything works well. Once started (it connects instantly - the SBIGs take about 10-15 or more seconds to connect). Cooling was similar to the STL11 but took initially about 45 minutes or longer to get there. Later firmware updates reduced that to about 30-35 minutes. That meant if you wanted to take dusk flats you had to start everything up about an hour in advance. If you forgot which I did several time you could not take dusk flats as warm flats were useless. Download times were faster than SBIG at 16 seconds for a 32mb 1x1 download. The FLI PL takes only a few seconds and is the fastest. Not a big deal though.
I liked this camera and took many good images with it. A very classy camera and only complaint really is the slow cooldown times. If power gets interrupted it warms up slowly and then recools and this takes even longer - 1 hour or more. This happened once at 3am - so that meant no more imaging that night.
I give this camera a 9 out of 10 with the 1 point deduction for the cooling issue.
The filter wheel for this camera is also very classy with several nice features. Repeatability, flexibility in mounting different thickness filters, very fast selection of filters. Main weakness is it had cutouts in the filter carousel to make it lighter. But this also meant dust could fall into the camera CCD window and fresh flats were needed more often and more cleaning was required.
FLI Microline 8300. To me this was to date the most perfect camera. I cannot fault it in any way. -35C chip cooling available all year round. -40C on a cooler night. Fast downloads, no noise, clean chip, instant connection, quiet, compact, light, excellent adapter connections.
The filter wheel cover is fairly thin and the thread depth of adapters needs to be only 3mm otherwise they will go in to far and jam the carousel and you have to grind them back or pack them out with a washer. So the cover of their filter wheels could be thick like the Apogee's. Otherwise they are fabulous.
FLI Proline 16803. Same as Microline, very nice. It is a heavy camera - heavier even than the Apogee (I didn't get any flex from the Apogee but I have seen minor flex with the Proline due to its weight).
fast downloads, cooling is not as good as it was made to be on their website. Mine gets about 44-5C cooling and the site implies 55C. Neither was my Apogee U16M where it only got 35-6C cooling and promoted 40C. I image at -30C or -35C though year round. The shutter is quieter than the Apogee, the fans quieter and smoother, the cooling is fast, downloads are very fast (1x1 32mb image is about 6 seconds or so),
it connects instantly, it stays connected if anything is interrupted,
has a dew heater, reflection mask, RBI control. The chip is perfect as well and noise is absolutely minimal. At -35C dark noise is not noticeable at all.
SBIG ST402ME. I use this as a guide camera. A very good and sensitive guide camera. I can get .2 second guide exposures on this baby using an Astrotech 66ED guide scope. Getting a guide star is never a problem.
Power supply plus is cheap and subject to fault. Mine is touchy and if you screw it all the way in the power stops. The autoguiding cable is also stuck in the cameras jack. So cable connectors could be higher quality. Same dependence on the computer which is a constant irritation and often requires rebooting CCDSoft if it gets interrupted (which happens occassionally due to the poor power connector).
Overall though the connector could be fixed easily and the guide jack replaced and the camera does do a good job. I found though that dark subtract was a bit odd with this one and I would sometimes have hot pixels being selected for guide stars if I used auto select. I normally take a 1x1 shot and then select subframe and select a bright sharp star, frame a bix around it and then reshoot it in the subframe and use autoselect in the autoguide dialogue to centre it and I am on my way autoguiding.
A good camera overall.
I hope this helps.
Greg.
Nikon D70 DSLR modified (by myself)
Canon 20D DSLR (modified by myself).
Nikon D70.
I should have chosen what was then the Canon 10D. The Nikon was
not too bad but had bad amp glow and Nikon RAW images are not trully raw. They apply a median filter to control noise. Overall a fun camera.
Canon 20D.
Wow, way more sensitive and cleaner than the D70. I modified a few of these. They are trickier to mod than the Nikon which was quite easy. The Canon has a few spots where things can go wrong when modifiying.
I took many nice images with this camera and I liked it a lot.
Images Plus became quite sophisticated and laptop control of the camera made it perform much like a CCD camera in terms of focus and framing and image acquisition.
CCD cameras:
SBIG ST2000XM (2001 chip)
SBIG STL11000XCM (one shot colour 11000 chip class 1)
SBIG STL11002M class 2
Apogee U16M 16803 camera class 1
FLI Microline 8300 class 1 mono
FLI Proline 16803 class 1 mono
Custom Scientific, Astrodon Ha,S11,O111, LRGB 50mm round,
Astrodon 1.25 Ha,LRGB, Baader 50mm square clear, LRGB, Astronomik type 11 LRGb 50mm square, Astrodon 5nm Ha, O111, S11 50mm square.
The ST2000XM was my first CCD camera after using a modified Nikon
D70 for some time and a modified Canon 20D as well.
At first it was disappointing and I preferred the DSLR. It was noisy, it frosted up, it seemed a tad fussy to setup. It seemed hard to do colour combine and get a decent colour. But that was mostly learning curve.
CCDstack, Astrodon filters, baking the desiccant, doing darks/flats all helped get some reasonably good images out of it over time.
Self guiding was a great advance though and I liked that a lot except when you wanted to do Ha imaging where it was next to useless.
Also occassionally I had to make the blue guide exposures longer as autoguiding would fail if the exposures were too short with the blue filter (too dim for the gudie star).
Overall a nice camera and I quite liked it in the end.
Next camera was the STL11000XCM one shot colour.
I liked this camera a lot and imaging was quite simple with it. Downside of one shot colour is colour noise in the dim areas and less Ha and narrowband sensitivity but it still would take Ha images quite well.
Self guiding was easy as there were no filters (except for Ha).
Overall a very nice and easy to use camera and lovely field of view and nice images from it.
STL11002M. A very classy camera. Looks nice, easy to use,self guiding is good, remote guide head makes it flexible if you want to do narrowband imaging. Whack it in and it goes well. Only complaint with it really was the lack of a memory buffer. It also does not have the driver in its memory so it boots up off the computer every time. If power or the computer or a bad cable interrupts the connection it needs to be restarted and you usually have to restart your CCDsoft program as well.Very very annoying and when you use an Apogee or FLI camera and it connects bang - instantly and stays running no matter what happens to your computer it makes that aspect of the STL seem very bad. Not sure if the STX is like the FLI and Apogee in this regard, I hope so as to me it is very important. It makes the camera less reliable. If you come out to your observatory after 4 hours only to find the camera disconnected for some reason like a cable got loose etc and it was disconnected it isn't fun. Happily this is not a common occurrence. But it is a big weakness of SBIG cameras (perhaps other brands as well) and a big plus for Apogee and FLI (and perhaps other brands as well).
Apart from that its a great camera. The internal filter wheel gets rid of another power and USB cable and the self guide means you don't need an autoguiding camera and scope and possible flexure problems. These were its best features. The camera is noisy however compared to FLI and Apogee and from what I read Starlight Express. Same chip different brand - bang 1/10th the noise. So SBIG is the market leader but perhaps has been sitting on its laurels whilst other makers try harder and get better supporting electronics.26 seconds to download a 1x1 image was also quite slow.
Overall I really liked my STL11. Both the STLs had vertical lines in them
(the chip not the camera maker). These would sometimes show through in processing images even though they should dark subtract out. Something to keep in mind with that family of chip -full frame type).
Apogee U16M.
A lovely camera. Looks nice, its compact. Everything works well. Once started (it connects instantly - the SBIGs take about 10-15 or more seconds to connect). Cooling was similar to the STL11 but took initially about 45 minutes or longer to get there. Later firmware updates reduced that to about 30-35 minutes. That meant if you wanted to take dusk flats you had to start everything up about an hour in advance. If you forgot which I did several time you could not take dusk flats as warm flats were useless. Download times were faster than SBIG at 16 seconds for a 32mb 1x1 download. The FLI PL takes only a few seconds and is the fastest. Not a big deal though.
I liked this camera and took many good images with it. A very classy camera and only complaint really is the slow cooldown times. If power gets interrupted it warms up slowly and then recools and this takes even longer - 1 hour or more. This happened once at 3am - so that meant no more imaging that night.
I give this camera a 9 out of 10 with the 1 point deduction for the cooling issue.
The filter wheel for this camera is also very classy with several nice features. Repeatability, flexibility in mounting different thickness filters, very fast selection of filters. Main weakness is it had cutouts in the filter carousel to make it lighter. But this also meant dust could fall into the camera CCD window and fresh flats were needed more often and more cleaning was required.
FLI Microline 8300. To me this was to date the most perfect camera. I cannot fault it in any way. -35C chip cooling available all year round. -40C on a cooler night. Fast downloads, no noise, clean chip, instant connection, quiet, compact, light, excellent adapter connections.
The filter wheel cover is fairly thin and the thread depth of adapters needs to be only 3mm otherwise they will go in to far and jam the carousel and you have to grind them back or pack them out with a washer. So the cover of their filter wheels could be thick like the Apogee's. Otherwise they are fabulous.
FLI Proline 16803. Same as Microline, very nice. It is a heavy camera - heavier even than the Apogee (I didn't get any flex from the Apogee but I have seen minor flex with the Proline due to its weight).
fast downloads, cooling is not as good as it was made to be on their website. Mine gets about 44-5C cooling and the site implies 55C. Neither was my Apogee U16M where it only got 35-6C cooling and promoted 40C. I image at -30C or -35C though year round. The shutter is quieter than the Apogee, the fans quieter and smoother, the cooling is fast, downloads are very fast (1x1 32mb image is about 6 seconds or so),
it connects instantly, it stays connected if anything is interrupted,
has a dew heater, reflection mask, RBI control. The chip is perfect as well and noise is absolutely minimal. At -35C dark noise is not noticeable at all.
SBIG ST402ME. I use this as a guide camera. A very good and sensitive guide camera. I can get .2 second guide exposures on this baby using an Astrotech 66ED guide scope. Getting a guide star is never a problem.
Power supply plus is cheap and subject to fault. Mine is touchy and if you screw it all the way in the power stops. The autoguiding cable is also stuck in the cameras jack. So cable connectors could be higher quality. Same dependence on the computer which is a constant irritation and often requires rebooting CCDSoft if it gets interrupted (which happens occassionally due to the poor power connector).
Overall though the connector could be fixed easily and the guide jack replaced and the camera does do a good job. I found though that dark subtract was a bit odd with this one and I would sometimes have hot pixels being selected for guide stars if I used auto select. I normally take a 1x1 shot and then select subframe and select a bright sharp star, frame a bix around it and then reshoot it in the subframe and use autoselect in the autoguide dialogue to centre it and I am on my way autoguiding.
A good camera overall.
I hope this helps.
Greg.