TheSkySearchers

My brand new Sbig Aluma U694/FW8G/AO-8a showed up this morning, beautiful! A little history here, I restarted my interest in Astronomy in 2016 once I moved back to where I grew up, a suitable decent dark site about 38 km outside of Halifax NS. I bought a older LX-200gps off Kijiji and quickly got interested in trying some imaging. I didn't want to spend a large outlay at the beginning so I found a old sbig ST-6 with filter wheel and filters on Astromart for $150. The camera worked great, and I was suitability impressed that something built in 1992 or so worked as it should, so then and there I became a fan of their products..the electronics on the Meade Lx-200 gps not so much. I've owned since then used St-7xme, STT-8300, STl-11000m and a ST-10xme models along with their adaptive optics, AO-8t and AO-l. I only recently tried a CMOS sensor model, a QHY183m that would be an excellent match for my Meade 70mm quad but I gave it a good try but trying to figure out the conundrum of calibration (offset&gain) compared to the outright ease of CCD technology was a nightmare for me. So I bit the bullet and bought this new camera that comes with the very low noise sony ICX-694 chip 4.54um pixel size is a good compromise that will work ok with my shortest length refractor (350mm fl) and my soon to arrive WO flt132 and my Meade 12" (2438mm fl) binning the chip 2x2. The missing luminance filter should arrive later today from Sbig so I haven't yet broke the camera and accessories out of their packaging but here are a few images.

Very nice, can't wait to see your images, I've always wanted to try a ccd but have been deterrent because of the extra noise over a cmos, but certainly has thier pros, bigger pixels which is handy for longer fl scopes and binning.

I am sitting here getting some dark masters done with the camera and while I knew the Sony icx694 chip was clean, I can hardly believe how clean it is especially compared to the Kodak/interline chips I was using. It's 99% as clean as the CMOS chip in the QHY183M I had. That being said I never had too much issue with the extra hot pixels in my older Sbig cameras, as long as you take at least 15 subs per filter and dither between them, Pixinsight would do its magic and take care of 95% of the hot pixels, then clone stamp would take care of the rest.
Cost is the biggest deterrent I think these Sony chips are just plain expensive!!