Zwo 224 or 290 colour

[Steve Clay]

127 Mak and soon to purchase a 130 pds.

Is the Zwo 224 or 290 the best option for my scopes

 Want to do both DSO live stacking and lunar/ planetary

Cheers

Steve

[Anthonyexmouth]

I've got the 290 and I wouldn't be tempted to use it for DSO imaging. What's your budget? What mount have you got? 

[Steve Clay]

Budget about 250 and i have the AZGTI.

[vlaiv]

I would lean towards 224 for those intended purposes. Not much between those two cams really.

290 has benefit of larger pixel count, and smaller pixels and 224 has a bit better read noise characteristics. Both are used in mentioned roles successfully.

There is plenty of advice for planetary imaging and your Mak should work well "out of the box" in that role. For live stacking / EAA however, you need to be "careful" how you approach. Such focal length will give you very narrow FOV and very high sampling rate - not something that you want in this role, so you need to think about focal reducer. If you however get 130PDS, that one is going to do well in this role, but again think about adding focal reducer with coma corrector for that setup to get better sampling rate and wider FOV since both mentioned cameras have small sensors.

This thread might also be interesting to you:

There is example of ASI224 used with 130ps (not pds, so single speed focuser) using this method, and my view is that even Mak should work OK in this use case provided that method gives satisfactory results at all (jury is still out on that one - more testing is needed by interested parties, myself included).

I did however do a bit of live stacking with x0.5 reducer, similar sensor (in terms of pixel count / size - QHY5LIIc - which is same as asi120) and 8" F/6 newtonian and it worked well. At that speed and sensor size, I did not need to use coma corrector, but I suspect that at F/5 you'll probably want to use one.

[Steve Clay]

Very informative thank you.

[R26 oldtimer]

The real question (for EEVA at least) is 224c or 290mono.