I am now reporting on some experiments on using the Samsung SDC-435 (SCB-2000) frame-accumulating, colour video camera for deep sky imaging:
The camera:
I attached the camera to a 10" f/4.8 Newtonian reflector telescope and used Astrovideo to capture 100 frame AVIs with a 5s delay between the capture of individual frames. The sens was set to auto and max accumulation of 512. AGC was set to high and the camera was set to colour. A 100 frame dark-frame AVI was captured with fixed align with the cap on the front of the scope.
The camera adjusted automatically so that the dark-frame was far too light as discussed for Mintron Dark Frames in our article in ‘Popular Astronomy’ April-June 2010. Astrovideo also simultaneously tracked and summed the captured frames and produced an image that was saved as a .BMP file. This image was then used along with the dark-frame in Dark-Frame-Scaler to produce a corrected dark-frame for use with the AVI in Registax.
The first results are presented here rescaled from 640 x 480 to 500 x 375:
M13
M3:
M51
M64:
M57:
I needed to investigate camera settings to see whether the colour balance can be improved. The blueish tinted filter that filters out IR in front of the 1/3" chip will also cut down H-alpha to levels that could be below 20% of their actual values. I then modified the camera by removing this filter.
My intitial reaction was that this camera can be used for Deep Sky observing and imaging although the live views have a fair bit of colour noise.
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Comet McNaught C2009/R1 with an Unmodified Samsung SDC-435 frame-accumulating video camera and an 11" F/10 SCT
June 21/22, 2010
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