12% crescent Moon with an SVBONY SV205 and a 102mm refractor with AstroDMx Capture for Linux

The SV205 is an 8 Mp, USB 3.0 camera with pixel vignetting. New firmware for the camera has enabled it to be recognised as a USB 3.0 device by Linux.  A motor-focuser-adapted Bresser Messier AR 102xs f/4.5 ED refractor was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount and the SV205 camera was placed at the prime focus. AstroDMx Capture for Linux, running on an Ubuntu Linux laptop, was set to map to greyscale and used to capture a 1000-frame SER file of the 12% waxing, crescent Moon in a twilight sky, with real-time flat-field correction to correct for the pixel vignetting. A capture frame-rate of about 13fps was maintained during the capture. The capture resolution was 3264 x 2448.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Linux capturing data from the SV205

The best 90% of the frames in the SER file were stacked in Autostakkert! 3.1, wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 and post processed in Glimpse (a fork of the Gimp).

12% waxing, crescent Moon

Closer view

The SV205 is a challenging camera, but it was possible to obtain pleasing results using this fast refractor. In future, testing will be done with a Maksutov to test the high resolution capture, which is what this camera is really for. Mapping to greyscale reduces the file-size to 1/3 of the full-colour image, which facilitates capture rates. With the Moon, greyscale is frequently used for image capture.