Hi Eric,
Why would the DMK's have less sensitivity than a B&W Toucam with the same CCD ??
One of the first things I noticed about my DMK was that it had a lot less noise than
my Toucam.
I agree that 30FPS at 1/33s exposure may not give enough light for scopes with less than 10" of aperture but 15 to 20 FPS uncompressed may work just fine and you can not do that(uncompressed) with a Toucam, some may argue the advantages of faster frames rates but I am a firm believer in them.
In about five weeks I will have a Point Grey Dragonfly camera (funny name
) that images at 30FPS in raw color, it will be interesting to see what this camera can do on Saturn and Jupiter with the 18"
Thanks,
Wes Higgins
Eric Todd said:I just answered this question over on my forum, based on some research I've been conducting, but would appreciate comments here, particularly from those using firewire cams for dimmer work, like Jupiter and Saturn, with 10" scopes or less. My response was as follows:
"....Although I haven't tried the firewire cams, I have done some research into them lately. What I find is that even with the more expensive ones, they use a CCD that has the same or less sensitivity than a b&w modified Toucam (ICX098BL). This would mean that, even though you no longer have compression, you would still have to increase the gain even more than a Toucam at the higher frame rates. So the big disadvantage would be lack of gain which means more frames still need to be stacked to overcome noise. So, even though you might be capturing double or triple the amount of frames, you still have to stack that double or triple amount to make up for higher gain levels. No advantage for dimmer targets like Saturn or maybe Jupiter.
I do see one advantage with firewire though. On bright targets like the moon/ sun and *perhaps* Jupiter, gain is not as much of an issue and can be kept minimal. The camera should, in that case, be a better performer than a Toucam because more frames can be stacked at low noise levels. I question this for Jupiter though because of its dimness.
Of course, firewire should work quite well with large aperture scopes, which are independent of the aforementioned....."
The big scoped guys, like Wes and Mike, I'm excluding since I think firewire should help you in all cases since you have the aperture to make up for the gain. I'm more interested in seeing how they perform with the smaller scopes since gain amount becomes an issue (although I'm not saying not to comment: please do if you want to
). I'm also going to exclude the ATK series.
Thanks,
Eric
