ASI294MC Pro to Compliment AtikOne

[dazza1639]

I currently do most of my imaging with my AtikOne 6.0, I have a full LRGB filter set and Ha,OIII & SII filters. with the really poor weather we have had over the last couple of years and work commitments I am finding harder and harder to get to a point where I have enough data in the relevant filters, to compose final or even partly completed images. I have lots of part finished projects where I have the luminescence but not a complete set of RGB, or projects where I have managed to get the Ha but not the OIII & SII. It is so disheartening and frustrating. To this end I am thinking of adding an ASI294MC Pro one shot colour camera to my setup and perhaps a dual ban filter. My thinking is that with the larger sensor size and the ability to gather the colour data in one go, I would be able to more quickly get the data to add to my Luminescence and narrow band images to start to get some more finished images, albeit with reduced sensitivity and detail that could be achieved with my mono setup.

I have tweeted about this at https://twitter.com/dazza1639/status/1183739265970331648. I would really appreciate some feedback on this idea. Any additional follows, retweets or comments on twitter would also be appreciated.

Thanks

Darren

[Adam J]

46 minutes ago, dazza1639 said:

I currently do most of my imaging with my AtikOne 6.0, I have a full LRGB filter set and Ha,OIII & SII filters. with the really poor weather we have had over the last couple of years and work commitments I am finding harder and harder to get to a point where I have enough data in the relevant filters, to compose final or even partly completed images. I have lots of part finished projects where I have the luminescence but not a complete set of RGB, or projects where I have managed to get the Ha but not the OIII & SII. It is so disheartening and frustrating. To this end I am thinking of adding an ASI294MC Pro one shot colour camera to my setup and perhaps a dual ban filter. My thinking is that with the larger sensor size and the ability to gather the colour data in one go, I would be able to more quickly get the data to add to my Luminescence and narrow band images to start to get some more finished images, albeit with reduced sensitivity and detail that could be achieved with my mono setup.

I have tweeted about this at https://twitter.com/dazza1639/status/1183739265970331648. I would really appreciate some feedback on this idea. Any additional follows, retweets or comments on twitter would also be appreciated.

Thanks

Darren

In a word, no.

You are far better off running a second mono camera if you are thinking of a duel scope setup. It will allow you to gather twice the data in a night but without the sensitivity loss of OSC. 

If not a duel scope then the OSC will just be plane slower than your current camera and so you are better off going with LRGB. 

The Luminance component cant be replicated by OSC and while duel band filters and OSC have a place in imaging for people who want to image more casually and take a single image in a single imaging session they just cant compete with multi night imaging with mono and filters. That is especially so with the OIII component of the duel band filter which is inefficient due to straddling the Blue and Green Pixels greatly reducing QE. 

Adam

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by Adam J

[tooth_dr]

I did a bit of mono and OSC (DSLR, not cooled), and it was a great way of getting colour images with a detailed luminance layer.  Since then I bought a second mono camera and a second set of filters, EFW, etc.  I'll be honest I'm still not getting RGB images, but my NB images are much quicker to produce.  I'll do a night of Ha on both cameras, and then a night of Oiii and Sii, so in two nights I have a complete NB image, with a decent amount of integration time.

[dazza1639]

Interesting thanks for the replies. I have been impressed with a lot of the images that have been produced with this camera. I would highly recommend watching the YouTube videos posted by AstroBackyard who has produced some stunning results. The main thing for me is to have something that I can process at the end of the night, which at the moment I don’t get this unless I want to create mono images.

[smr]

Think you've answered it for yourself then, the ASI294MC Pro with say, the STC Duo Narrowband filter looks like a great combination. 

I think I'm going to upgrade to this as it will be a nice introduction to dedicated cameras from a DSLR and I could then upgrade to Mono perhaps when I've mastered cooling, gain, darks etc. all of that stuff. 

Since August I have had 4 clear nights, two with great transparency and seeing but two not quite so much. 

And that's every single night since then. If it's clear and moonless that's all we have had. I think if you live where clear skies are the norm (South of France for instance) then I'd definitely invest in Mono as you'd just have so much more time to invest in a Mono system, no rushing, no frustration in that you haven't completed a sequence of imaging or collected all of the data from each filter etc.

As OSC Cameras improve as well I just think they're going to get better and better, and these narrowband filters are improving all the time as well. The QHY268C looks terrific, is in development, and will be around £1,900.

[adoldesa]

Hi There, just started on the forum and I was looking for posts about the ASI294MC Pro.

I have just bought this camera as my first move from DSLR (Nikon D750) to dedicated camera. I had the same dilemma between mono and OSC for a while and in the end I choose OSC mostly because of the little time I get to image due to the weather here in the SW of England. I use a tri-band filter and a more broadband light-pollution filter and I found a massive difference compared to the DSLR. I also use APP for processing which has a de-bayer algorithm to "extract" the Ha and OIII channels from the OSC data using tri-band filters (I don't know if other programs have this, surely not DSS). I get good results with it, although they cannot compete with full LRGB on a mono sensor it is a great compromise.

Hope this helps.

[newbie alert]

On 15/10/2019 at 13:11, smr said:

 

As OSC Cameras improve as well I just think they're going to get better and better, and these narrowband filters are improving all the time

A OSC will always have the Bayer matrix so will never compete with mono..it just can't

I'd suggest run the atik one, and get a capture program so you can loop your filters capture the full set of data instead of one filter on a certain night, then another a week later etc.. something like SGP or N.I.N.A ..far cheaper than a new camera or another setup