Well yet another weekend of rainy weather and cloud. I stayed at my dark site another night and I was blessed with a perfect night last night. Totally clear all night with good seeing.
I was itching to use my new FLI Microline 8300 camera (8.3 megapixel).
This camera seems pretty hot.
It slams the cooling down 55C below ambient temps. It was about 17C and it went to -40C in about 4 minutes or so - alright!!
The chip gives virtually no noise at that sort of temperature. The 15.8mb images download in about a second. The fan is super quiet. It is compact and light. It has a very nice shutter and sealed CCD chamber with inert gas. It has an RBI fix (residual bulk image - afterimages of bright objects that can plague some CCDs mainly the 09000 chip).
It has no lines, patterns and a super clean chip that seems virtually flawless.
It gives my setups better image scale with a primary purpose of imaging galaxies.
Its nice!
Here is first light with an AP140, Tak 4 inch flattener (most likely doesn't need it the chip is smaller than a DSLR in size), FLI digital focuser (nice!) and FLI 50mm square filter wheel with Astronomik type 2 filters.
I have concluded that I prefer the Astronomik filters the best as long as you can work out a way to mount them. They are only about 1mm thick and normal filters are more like 3mm. They don't come with spacers or packers (except the 50mm round). I worked out a solution with bent carboard washers holding the down.
LRGB 15 15 15 15 (Luminance 1x1, RGB all at -40C, darks, flats and bias, CCDstack with the new u-beaut aligning tool and Photoshop CS4.
http://www.pbase.com/gregbradley/image/106563547
Greg.