New Sbig Aluma U694 camera
Posted: Mon Nov 18, 2019 4:16 pm
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.