Quote:
Originally Posted by Shiraz
the OSC has much higher quantum efficiency and larger pixels than the mono, so it will be quite sensitive. The downside of the large pixels is that galaxies will be pretty small - great for nebulae though.
The mono has relatively low quantum efficiency, but the small pixels will give you much bigger galaxy images. You will just have to spend longer taking images than with the OSC to overcome the inherently low sensitivity.
You are right not to worry too much about cooling - these chips are very quiet and you will not really need to do darks for most targets.
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Ahh, that's interesting. I wonder how that would work out for nebula in terms of exposure length.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pluto
If you're using that mono camera with your refractor you'll need an L CCD filter at least to block IR.
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Thanks mate, I'd wondered about this. Just found Sony's documentation on the sensor in questions which confirms the sensitivity to IR which I didn't know initially. I thought that IR was effectively useless for astrophotography so I had made the assumption that these cameras would block that. That's what I get for making assumptions... :-)
Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnH
EXCEPT
With a MONO camera all the light hits all the pixels all the time - thus they are about 3x as sensitive as their OSC equivalents all other things being equal total exposure time for the same SNR will be the same. If you move to LRGB and bin the colour 2x2 you can get more data in less time than with a OSC. And you can use it for NB. The trade off is more processing and more gear.
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Wouldn't this just affect the resolution, rather than sensitivity, and thus mean that interpolation is required to make up those missing bits in each colour channel of the OSC? This would suggest that image quality would be improved with a mono, but sensitivity (all else being equal) would remain unchanged. Please correct me if I'm mistaken :-)
- I ended up pulling the trigger on the 314e mono. Time will tell if that was the right choice or not... given how inexpensive they are for a ccd I don't see it as being a high risk investment regardless.