[The_bluester (Paul)]

So, my nice new ASI2600 arrived yesterday so I thought I would put up some very initial impressions.

Firstly it is noticeably bigger and heavier than the ASI294MC Pro, no longer a Coke can. The unit comes shipped with the normal long ribbon USB3 cable and short USB2 cable to connect a focuser or similar to the hub, now with a right angle connector for the hub end which might be useful cable management wise, more to come there. It comes fitted with a nice screw in M42 blanking plug fitted in the hole in the tilt plate and the extensions come with a suitable cap to replace that.

With the current drivers loaded, detection of the camera via Voyager was seamless using the native driver, I set it up to shoot at the gain I hope to use most commonly ("Unity" gain, which is a little over that in fact, as far as I know and provides about 4e read noise with 51Ke full well)

It is now shooting a full dark library on the desk, cooled to -10 while I await me new mount and some spacers for setup on the scope. A quick comparison below of a 50 frame X 300 second master dark with my ASI294 and a 47 frame 300 second master dark (That is all the frames it has shot at 300 seconds so far) from the 2600, I will leave it to the reader to guess which is which!


I am looking forward to first light.