Astro Camera

[sjk]

Hi guys, I consider to buy an astro camera for astrophotography but I would be pleased if someone could help with a choosing.
I want a make decision between ZWO 294mc, 533mc or
Explore Scientific Deep Sky 16MB or 26MB or even
Omegon 533 color, 16000 color.
Do you have any experiences?
Thanks a lot for your advices.

SJK

[Graeme1858]

Hello SJK

Welcome to the Forum.

The cameras you listed are all good! It depends partly on what telescope you are going to use. What telescope have you got?

The ASI553 has a square sensor so produces square images rather than rectangular.

Regards

Graeme

[sjk]

Hello Graeme1858,
I gonna use omegon 203/800.
Thank you for your help.

[Gordon]

I have used a ZWO ASI553MC-Pro with My SkyWatcher 8” Quattro Imaging Newtonian. It works great!

[yobbo89]

The ZWO 294mc and the explorer 26MP looks nice they have the largest chips giving you a wider view but the drawback is that the wider the chip the more imperfections you get with your image towards the outer edge due coma on a under corrected fast newtonian .

have a look at the fov calc below and see what chip suits your needs in fov per target .

( please ignore the camera names in the image as the explore serries are not on the calculator yet, i have applied other simular matching cameras that use the same chips as the explore serries.)

ive included these.

red = asi 294 (IMX294C) (aps-c size)
yellow= asi 533 (Sony IMX533)
green= is the explore scientific 26mp (IMX571 chip)
teal =explore scientfic 16mp (Panasonic NM34230PLJ chip) ( same size as purple,can't be seen in the image too well)
purple= veTEC 16000 C Color (Panasonic MN34230) same chip as an asi1600v3 (4x3 size )

the veTEC 533 C Color is the same chip as yellow (asi 553) so i didn't add it to the list

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Thirds_system

https://astronomy.tools/calculators/fie ... messier=31

my opinion is that aps-c chips is about the max size i would use on a f4 newt , it just becomes to problematic to correct anything bigger like a full frame camera . i'm using the asi1600 it's a 4/3 size sensor which is slightly smaller then aps-c which is shown in the image above in the red box and the green box is an aps-c sensor size.

now we havn't talked about quantum efficiency which is the sensitivity of the camera and pixel scale ( arc seconds per pixel )