One shot colour Camera- help me choose the right one

[pyrasanth]

I don't normally look at one shot colour CCD cameras as I've always found the results wanting. However I feel that my earlier results with an Atik 490 OSC were down to poor technique & light pollution issues. Experience allows me to mitigate these issues. The attraction of being able to capture all the RGB in one hit has become increasingly attractive noting that it can take just as long to capture the data because of the longer subs but at least you get 3 frames completely aligned & PixInsight batch processing makes short work of the Debayer process.

I currently use 2 cameras both mono. An Atik 460 and an Atk 11000 . I do a fair bit of cropping with the Atik 11000 as the field of view is massive. The Atik 460 allows most moderate sized objects to fit on the CDD but if I went for the obvious easy choice of the Atik 460 OSC the smaller field of view would compromise the wider field of the 11000.

So my thoughts, sticking with Atik, is to go with the 4000 OSC which would give a wider field and be able to be resampled up & down to suit both cameras. Since I typically image at 1960 mm on the C11 Edge this would give me an image scale of 0.78 on the 4000 which is over sampled but should not matter too much for colour. I could then use this colour camera for both of the ATik's

Let me know if you think this would be a good compromise as I really want an OSC that will cover both camps. The smaller Sony Sensor Atiks are nice as well but I'm concerned with having to scale to the larger image size of the ATik 11000 thus losing field of view even though I'm never likely to reach its true sampling potential under my skies. I would probably bin the ATik 11000 at 2x2 to more closely match the 4000 if I went down that route. The other alternative is to just get another Atik 11000 OSC but that would be £1000.00 more expensive than the 4000 OSC & since I mostly crop the 11000 images perhaps a waste of pixels & cash.

Let me know what you think and I'm open to other cameras suggestions if the need is able to be better addressed.

[ollypenrice]

I ran Atik 4000 OSC and mono as partners for several years. My logic was similar to yours. The idea wasn't diastrous but nor was it one I stuck with in the end. I now run two monos (or three including Yves').

I hardly ever used L-OSC. It was usually Ha-OSC or L-OSC plus LRGB. On bright targets the OSC was not bad at all. The fainter the target the slower it seemed to be. My big objection to OSC for astronomy is the filter balance of 2xG plus 1xR plus 1xB. Nobody in astronomy shoots twice as much green as red or blue! The double green comes from the needs of daylight photography, green working as a luminance layer (as described by Bayer's patent, so this isn't just me.)

Having tried double mono and mono - OSC I am irrevocably wedded to double mono.

Olly