First light for the prototype SV305M Pro, monochrome USB3.0, CMOS astronomy camera.
The SV305M Pro has a IMX290LLR-C sensor.
The IMX290 is a STARVIS back-illuminated CMOS image sensor with Starvis technology which produces a high quality image in the visible and near infra-red wavelengths and has low noise. The camera does not have a UV/IR cut filter.
Nicola has implemented the prototype camera in AstroDMx Capture for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Basically, The SV305M Pro is a monochrome version of the SV305 Pro, having a USB3.0 and an ST4 port.
The SV305M Pro prototype camera
For testing the camera as an imager, it was mounted without filters at the focus of a Bresser Messier-AR-102-xs/460 ED, f/4.5 refractor mounted on a Celestron AVX mount, and with an Svbony SV165 Guide-scope mounted on the refractor.
An SV305 camera was used as a guide-camera, with PHD2 running on a Fedora Linux laptop to do pulse auto-guiding, that is, via the hand controller and not the ST4 port.
Screenshot of the pulse auto-guiding with PHD2 and Fedora Linux
AstroDMx Capture for Windows was used for capturing images. 60 x 30s FITS exposures and 10 x 60s exposures were captured with matching dark-frames and also 50x bias frames were captured. The files were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.
Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Windows capturing M4 data with the prototype SV305M Pro
Final image of M4
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The camera performed well as an imaging device. At these latitudes in south Wales, UK, M4 is always quite low in the sky and there is a tendancy for stars to bloat due to the thickness of atmosphere that the light has to pass through. Also the camera was used without any filters as the test was of the camera alone. The result was satisfactory and showed the camera to be sensitive. The noise levels were also low, with few evident hot pixels.
