A quick Jellyfish

[Catanonia]

Really close to the moon last night and was having all sorts of flat / dark calibration issues along with fogging of my CCD.

I managed to stack together 13 x 10minutes 7nm HA with my 8inch Newtonian running at F2.8  (ASA corrector) and the QHY9 Mono.

Learnt a lot about the peculiarities of Pedestal values, noise in darks etc etc, but I managed to pull a semi decent image together.

It also looks like I have a bent spider vein looking at the spikes on the bright star.

Still also getting comet tails on stars on the top left quadrant (bottom left before rotation) and it is really really bugging me. Must be tilt on that part of the CCD that really shows @F2.8 

Any way, hope you like a quick Jellyfish.

 

[MarkCasazza]

How it that QHY9 treating you? I read your review from years back and I seem to be in the same place going from a DSLR to Mono CCD.

 

[Catanonia]

On 18/03/2016 at 01:45, MarkCasazza said:

How it that QHY9 treating you? I read your review from years back and I seem to be in the same place going from a DSLR to Mono CCD.

 

It is not a well known or accepted CCD and does have it's peculiarities at time. I like the cooling, it set it to -20 and it has no issues getting there. The large sensor format based on the Kodak 8300 chip is nice.

But there are issues with condensation causing chip issues where the liquid vapour would short out the CCD pins. This has been resolved in newer QHY9 CCD's, but I have had to return mine once due to this and it goes all the way back to Asia for this.

The filter wheel can be a pain with its design and getting on other parts into the optical train, so hunting for correct adapters can be fun.

Image quality is very good, low noise, but mine has started to develop quite a few hot pixels after 3+ years.

The support on the website / forum is good and very helpful.

Overall, yes I am pleased with it and worth the money (cheaper than other types) at the time. Especially if you get the mono + FW + 2 inch filter combination deal.