First tests on the SVBONY SV305 astronomy camera

SV305 a new Astronomy camera

We were supplied with a SVBONY SV305 camera by the company and have started testing this astronomy camera, prior to implementing it in AstroDMx Capture for Linux and macOS
This is a home grown, full-fledged, one shot colour astronomy camera from SVBONY. It uses the back-illuminated Sony IMX290 6.5mm (diagonal) CMOS sensor with 2.9µm square pixels. Like a number of astronomy cameras available at the moment, it features 128MB of DDR ll RAM as an image buffer. It has a USB2.0 computer interface. It is a 2Mp camera giving a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080. It supports arbitraty size ROI and has a 12bit ADC. The camera outputs 8 bit and 12 bit RAW data. The exposure range is from 1 ms to a respectable 30 minutes.

Unboxing the SV305

The SV305 arrived in a sturdy box containing the camera, a 1.25" , filter-threaded adapter with a dust cap, a C/CS adapter that allows the attachment of a C/CS lens if required, a 1.5m USB 2.0 lead with a short flyout lead with a USB connector for extra power if required.

The camera housing

The SV305 is housed in a well built, aluminium case of familiar design, reminiscent of earlier SVBONY electronic eyepiece cameras distinguishing this camera at a glance, from similar cameras from other manufacturers. The camera is uncooled, but the metal case should facilitate excess heat dissipation.

The IMX290 CMOS protector is protected behind an optical glass window. The overall look and feel is of a well built, sturdy camera.

First Light

The first tests were made with a freshly built Windows 10 laptop running SharpCap capture software. Linux and macOS implementation will be completed for AstroDMx Capture as soon as we are provided with SDKs.
The SV305 was placed at the Cassegrain focus of a Skymax 127 Maksutov telescope mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount.
Four overlapping regions of the 46.7% waxing, crescent Moon were imaged at maximum resolution 1920 x 1080. Four, 5000-frame SER files were captured. The best 50% of the frames in the SER files were stacked in Autostakkert! 3. The resulting images were wavelet processed in Registax 5.1, cropped back to exactly 1920 x 1080 in the Gimp 2.10, stitched together into a 4-pane mosaic in Microsoft ICE and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.

4-Pane Mosaic lunar image

Full size

First impressions of the SVBONY SV305 are very favourable. The camera behaved perfectly during the imaging session and was a pleasure to use. Further testing will involve planetary imaging, and, when the Moon is out of the way, Deep-Sky Imaging. The results will be posted here when they are obtained and news of implementation in Linux and macOS will be posted as soon as it is done.