CCD Cameras.

[Mac]

After my recent good new, i've been given permission to treat myself, make hay while the sun shines, as they say.

I was looking at the Starlight Xpress SXVF-H9 CCD Camera, from Ian King.
plus filter wheel and narrowband filters, Ha, Hb Sii Oiii.

Any coments, regarding this would be helppful?

good or bad.

cheers

Mac.

[RobertM]

An excellent Camera though you might want to also take a look at the new Atik that Chris and Fay have.  The read noise isn't quite as good as the Atiks (mine measures around 7-8e whereas the atiks are about 4-5e).  My SXV-H9 has hardly any hot (I think they are more warm) or dead pixels, not sure about the Atiks.

I've always been very happy with mine though there have been a couple of firmware corruption issues and it went back once to have a component changed to a newer type and a new USB port.  The support from SX has been tremendous, they will even fix things for free if they think it might have been down to manufacturing and that's a four year old camera !  The second and latest firmware corruption was a weekend a couple of weeks ago, it looked like it might have to go back.  I emailed Terry hoping he'd pick it up first thing Monday.  Next thing I know he has responded to the email and sent me the files and instructions, camera was back in action for Saturday !  You don't get support like that from many companies.

There are various narrow band filter manufaturers, the cheaper of them are Astronomik and Baader.  They both get very good reviews and so it's down to choice and whether you want to image below about F4, if so then Astronomiks may be the better choice.

The Astronomik narrowbands are 13nm bandpass
The Baader are 8nm passband plus an additional Ha of 35nm

The Baader filters have a thick rim which wont work too well with the Atik manual wheel unless you make sure that the male T-thread is very short so it doesn't protrude into the wheel.

You won't be dissapointed with that Sony chip in any camera and have to pay a lot more for something even marginally better.

Oh, and one last thing... plug.. my SXV-H9 (not the F model) is still for sale   I want a bigger chip.

[Rocket Pooch]

my atik has 180 hot pixels, thats more than the se camera, but its ok, camera design and use is brilliant dead easy to use, I'd save the money on the SE and get and atik 314l and 16ic as a guide cam for the same price.

chris