Atik 16ic Home

This is my Atik 16ic.  The camera is available in both colour and monochrome versions.  I have the colour version.  The front is fitted with a standard T-thread female and an eyepiece adaptor is supplied.  At the rear are four sockets;  (A) for the USB cable, (B) is for 12-volt power input, (C) is an autoguiding port.  It is only a USB1 device on the basis that exposures are normally so long that the extra 2 seconds required to download the image is neither here nor there.  This makes it very slow for planetary imaging, and focusing tends to be difficult too.  It is a 16-bit camera capable of good dynamic range and very low noise.  The camera has built-in thermo-electric cooling.  The CCD chip has a resolution of 659 by 494 pixels.
Its main drawback (to me anyway) is that it downloads in raw format and the images have to be processed by an extra piece of software (supplied) to bring out the colour.
There are two very helpful features of this camera.
1. It can be set to download only a small part of the whole image.  This is much quicker and helps enormously with focusing on a star.
2. It has a focus-assist function with can be set on a suitable star and display the maximum brightness and width of the image.  The software tracks the star if it should move during focusing.
Using the first of these features means that some trial and error will be necessary in the colour decoding process.

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