What camera should I buy?

[Stewartfrom the Cotswolds]

Hi folks, a very open question here as I don't know a huge amount about astro-photography yet. I am looking for a one off 'spend the money now' sort job so that I'm not immediately looking for an upgrade. I do like deep space objects like nebula's etc but also hoping to shoot the moon and planets too if possible! Will consider anything in the region of £500 - £1500 so please fire away with ideas as to what I should be looking at.
Cheers
Stewart

[happy-kat]

Will this be used for daytime as well?

What equipment do you already have or are planning to get?

[geordie85]

This is actually a difficult question without knowing your equipment and goals. Are you wanting a dslr or dedicated astro camera? Ccd or cmos? One shot colour or mono?

The only thing that can be answered is that you won't get a camera that will do both solar system and dso imaging as they require different specs and functionality. 

[Stewartfrom the Cotswolds]

Mount is a sky watcher AZ-EQ6 GT and have an orion starshoot autoguider pro with 60mm refractor for guiding.  Currently a 130mm by 650mm Newtonian ota which will be the last thing to upgrade as I want all the other necessaries  first so I know what weight to allow for the ota.  This will be a dedicated astro cam, I run a 27inch screen at 2560 x 1440 resolution so a camera that would fill that sort of screen would be great.
Is ccd better than cmos and is it worth going for peltier active cooling?  Also do you ultimately get better images with a mono and narrow band filters than with a single shot colour?

I think for this camera I will stick to DSO as  the focal length of my ota isn't enough for solar system.

[Stewartfrom the Cotswolds]

Thinking about this camera now:
ZWO ASI1600MM Monochrome 4/3" CMOS USB 3.0 Deep Sky Imaging Camera

Any thoughts on them and are they solid and reliable?

[kens]

I've got the ASi1600MM-C and I'm very happy with it. There are a lot of people using it so its easy to get help on this and other forums. 

CCD and CMOS are just "different" - each has its pros and cons. The main feature of CMOS is its low read noise which lets you take shorter subs. The downside is that you need to take a lot more to make up the integration time and this in turn can take up a lot of disk space and takes longer to process.

Definitely go with cooling - this reduces the noise from dark current on the sorts of exposures you need for DSOs.

I would also advocate mono vs colour as it lets you do narrow band imaging more effectively. To explain, in a colour camera a block of 4 pixels has two pixels covered with a green filter, one with red and one with blue. With clever processing, the colours can be interpolated so that each pixel ends up with a red, green and blue component. At face value you are lsoing resolution although very clever processing can overcome that. However, once you put a narrowband filter in front then 2 ro 3 out of the 4 pixels are seeing nothing and the interpolation algorithms aren't really designed for that.

Now if you want to go mono and a "once off" you should consider an electronic filter wheel (EFW) and a good set of filters. Good filters are not cheap and you need to consider what size. Bigger costs more. A feature of the ASI1600 is that when coupled with a ZWO filter wheel (and possibly others as well) it places the sensor close to the filters so the small 1.25" filters can be used. Smaller means cheaper which means you can go for better quality. The downside is that some people have had issues with reflection between the filters and sensor on some targets. Note that no combination of camera or filters is immune from this but some are worse than others. Just google "Alnitak Reflection" to see what I mean.

There are two other camera that use the same sensor as the ASI1600: the QHY163 and the Atik Horizon. All have their plusses and minuses so you shoudl at least compare them for your situation.

When it comes time to upgrade the OTA, don't forget to factor in an auto focuser. One of the single biggest image improvers in my opinion.