First Lighting a Mallincam Astronomical Video CCD camera

[Tiny]

This camera is the product of Rock Mallin in Canada. It is the same size as a small video security camera and has a similar set of back end control buttons and power and signal output lead plug-ins. But 3 switches on the side of the camera body hint that this is not just another security camera...

In fact this, the Hyper version of the Mallincam camera is built around a half inch chip with electronics designed to achieve very high levels of signal gain, while the Hyper plus switches allow a picture refresh of up to 56 seconds. There is also peltier cooling built in and the version used is designed to produce colour images.

With a shutter speed of open to 1/12,000 second the camera can, when set up right, produce live - on screen images of the planets, moon, sun and deep space objects. This last is in a way the thing the camera is really designed to do and with all bells and whistles running its imaging ability effectively inceases the magnitude range of the telescope it is used with. It also allows the camera plugged into a scope to be used in daytime to image objects like M57.

Our first light test was a little less ambitious than this. We simply used the camera with our grab and go 5" to image M42 in Orion once it cleared our neighbours house! Practice and knowledge will improve our doings - and the wind made the scope shiver - which does not help when you are doing a 7 second refresh - but using a seven second image we achieved M42 in colour on the 4 inch monitor. In fact at 7 seconds the centre was overcooked but give us time and we will improve (I hope).

As this was a one off, does it work session, the video was not connected via the S socket and, as for the grabber - let's get the first bit working. We did get a handheld camera and photographed the monitor screen but the photo produced seems to loose all the monitor colour - overlaying it with a rather pretty patten in multi colours to really spoil the photo as a view of M42. However we have been told that the live on-screen images will always be better than the same image grabbed for processing.

Still - a good start - the camera works - how well it works can come later, but it is an amazing thing to stare a a monitor and see an object in full colour that is a blur to the naked eye and realise that the image is being produced using a small camera and telescope.

O, and as it doesn't bother the camera or looking at the result in a TV monitor, we left our outside light on not quite for the whole session - but until the bulb blew as it is rarely on for more than a couple of minutes normally.

[chuenmanc]

Very interesting, thanks for the report. I've been thinking about an astrovideo camera, to get around the light pollution in my back garden. The views through an 11" SCT + integrating video camera should be spectacular!

Has anyone compared the Mallincam with the cameras that Bern at Modern Astronomy sells?

http://www.modernastronomy.com/camerasAstroVideo.html

Is Bernard allowed to respond here?

The Mallincam costs a lot more, but can do colour and longer integration times. Does this automatically mean it's better?