lunar / solar cam

[Rossco72]

I need to replace my firewire DMK21 as my new laptop only has USB3.0 and 2.0 ports and no express card or PCMCIA slots.

So it will have to be USB.

I have been looking at IS, Point Grey, Luminera etc and all seem to have a trade off between ExView chips, frame rate, 8 or 12 bit, size of sensor and pixels etc.

So, I am trying to prioritise requirements, for Lunar the moon is pretty bright, is an ExView chip needed? For Solar my 80mm Lunt seems to produce a big bright image and my current DMK21 had no issues without ExView.

What is a minimum frame rate, I have looked at larger chips which can do 12 or 18 fps or smaller ones at 120+ is there a minimum? My durrent DMK does 60 quite happily.

Will I notice a big difference between 8 bit 256 greays and 12 bit with 4096 greys?

For Solar I am finding that the larger pixels of my Astro Cams are getting flooded in 0.001 seconds and therefore I am wondering if smaller pixels would be of benefit?

So, a fair few questions, if you have any thoughts then please chip in!!

Cheers

[riklaunim]

Right now there are two options:

1. DMK21 with ICX618 (best for planetary. Lunar/Solar - small sensor)

2. Point Grey Chameleon (ICX445, USB. Has ROI for planetary, more pixels for solar/lunar, should work with FireCapture). Or French iNova with this sensor (costs more?? but has ST-4).

You need as sensitive sensor as plausible to use shortest exposures and lowest gain as plausible. On Moon it's good to use IR-passing filters to limit seeing effect. On white-light Sun narrowband Solar Continuum or alike also helps so it's very hard to reach lower than 1ms exposures on lowest gain.

12 vs 8 bit - on very low gain values and short exposures (with high histogram fill) 12-bit may be usable (usually only Solar imaging). On planetary constraints are much bigger and 12-bit won't add any benefits. Those 12-bit cameras can record 8-bit data so no problem.