|
The Starlight Xpress MX716 is a high-resolution, monochrome, cooled CCD camera that uses a Sony ICX249AL chip with 752 x 582 pixels in a 6.5mm x 4.8mm format. The CCD is an interline transfer device with 8.6 x 8.3 micron pixels. Well depth is 90,000e and the mean visual QE is 70% at 615nm. Readout noise is very low at 10e RMS. It's a great little camera from across the pond in the UK and it is very reasonably priced!
One of the nice features of the MX716 is that it can autoguide itself. This is accomplished by using half of the interline interlaced CCD for imaging while the other half is read out independently and the data used for guiding the telescope. Halfway through the exposure the fields are swapped thereby preserving image resolution. I use AstroArt software to control the camera and it can guide a LX200 without any additional hardware.
The color images below were assembled from b&w frames taken through either Red, Green, and Blue or Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow filter sets. I derived the filter weights used for the color image processing by imaging G2V spectral class stars. By using a solar analog star, an accurate white point can be set which allows for correctly balanced true color in the final color image. Image calibration and processing is done with AIP for Windows and final touches are added in PhotoStyler.
|
|
