An SVBONY SV705C OSC CMOS camera with a 2" Optalong LeNhance narrowband filter was placed at the Newtonian Focus of a Skywatcher 130 PDS Newtonian fitted with a coma corrector. The mount/scope was given a 3 star alignment and was focused with the camera on Altair, the last alignment star, using a Bahtinov Mask and AstroDMx Capture. The telescope assembly was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. The mount was connected via the hand controller to a Raspberry Pi computer running an INDI server. The mount was then controlled via AstroDMx Capture and PHD2 for autoguiding via WiFi. The Guide-scope was an SVBONY SV165 fitted with a QHY-5II-M camera. The camera cables from the SV705C and the QHY guide camera were connected directly to to imaging computer and guide computer respectively. The SV705C was running natively in AstroDMx Capture.
The equipment used
AstroDMx Capture then captured an hours worth of 2m 30s FITS exposures of the Western Veil nebula plus matching dark-frames
The camera has a Sony IMX585 sensor with 2.9μm square pixels and displays no amp glow. The sensor has a deep well depth of 38.8ke- which allows for a good dynamic range. There is no need to use dark-frames, however, we did use dark-frame correction in this experiment for completeness. However, it should be noted that with some stacking software/procedures, dark-frame subtraction can actually introduce an element of noise.
The data were calibrated, registered, stacked and partly processed in Deep Sky Stacker running in a Win10 virtual machine on the Fedora Linux computer used for imaging.
Post processing was completed in the Gimp and Neat Image.
The Western Veil nebula with an SV705C OSC camera
Imaging the Crescent Nebula
The imaging computer running AstroDMx Capture, imaging the Crescent nebula
AstroDMx Capture was used to acquire, plate solve and centre the Crescent Nebula. Then one hour's worth of 4min FITS exposures were captured plus matching dark frames.
The data were calibrated, registered, stacked and partly processed in Deep Sky Stacker and post processing was finished in the Gimp and Neat Image.
The Crescent Nebula with an SV705C OSC camera
Again, the SVBONY SV705C OSC CMOS camera has proved to be a capable deep sky imager and is now supported in the latest version of AstroDMx Capture.
Future tests will be done with 2x2 binning. The 2.9μm pixels are small enough to bin into effective 5.8 μm binned pixels that may increase the apparent sensitivity and either decrease required exposure times or allow more photons to be registered per effective pixel in a given time.
AstroDMx Capture can be downloaded HERE
