Thread: Camera time
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Old 26-11-2005, 06:20 PM
bird (Anthony Wesley)
Cyberdemon

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Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Rubyvale QLD
Posts: 2,627
Paul, I'm sure you've heard this all before, but anyway...

I'd say go for a monochrome camera + filter wheel, computer controlled if at all possible. There are a few on the market, I can only say that the Tru-Technologies "supa-slim" wheel + Astronomik RGB filters have worked very well for me.

www.trutek-uk.com
www.astronomik.de

On the choice of high-speed monochrome camera, I'd suggest looking at two companies:

www.theimagingsource.com (DMK21AF04 or DMK21AF03 cameras)
www.ptgrey.com (Dragonfly, Dragonfly2 (and the hi-res versions of each) and Dragonfly Express

These are all good cameras, and firewire gives you maximum compatibility. Which one should
you pick? Well, that's up to you I guess... the DX is the most future-proof because of it's
enormous capabilities, ie it can transfer at 800Mbit which comes to about 240 fps in 8 bit mode
or 120fps in 16 bit mode and so that gives you a fair bit of future proofing.

But I also know plenty of people using the DMK cameras and getting excellent results. The only place you might find a limitation with these cameras is when you want to go past about 30fps, and they are also 8 bit data only (from memory, I might be wrong here).

Do you have an electronic focusser? I'd also rate that as very important for planetary stuff.

regards, Bird
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