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| I'm not saying this is a poor camera, but I learned some lessons when I purchased it second hand from an advert in Astronomy Now magazine. It was advertised as a CCD camera with a half-inch, 1.3M pixel sensor and 1280 X 1024 resolution and up to 15 frames/sec, with a USB2 connection, for half the original price.
When it arrived I discovered that it is a CMOS device and only had a driver for Windows XP or 2000 and would not work with Windows 98 which I was using at the time on my laptop. I had not asked about the version of Windows it needed so that was my fault, but when I pointed out the misrepresentation of the sensor, the vendor got quite irate and said that is what he had been told. When people get irate in these circumstances, I suspect that they know perfectly well. The camera does, however, have some interesting features which could make it of interest to someone. As you will see in the picture, the camera has a nosepiece, which is 26 mm in diameter. As such it would slide inside a conventional eyepiece holder, which might be a solution for owners of Newtonian telescopes who cannot get a conventional camera close enough. The adaptors shown do not allow this, but a special could be made that would. There is a further oddity in this design. In order to widen the field of view, a field lens has been introduced at the front of the tube and there is a relay lens further down the barrel. This is an established technique to reduce vignetting (a reduction of light at the edges of the field caused by the interception of oblique rays by lens mounts). The odd thing is that the relay lens brings the field lens to focus on the CMOS chip. This means that any spec of dust on the field lens is brought to sharp focus in the picture. If an AVI is taken and the tracking is not perfect, then stacking will largely remove these, but it is an odd design in my view. The one place where I have found this type of optics is in a telescopic site for a rifle. I am considering if this camera has any use in its original form or whether I shall remove all lenses and see if it works any better without them (but this may involve breaking the camera). I hesitate to sell it on as I would be straight about it and I doubt anyone who knew what he was about would buy it. If you are interested, then contact me at the address on my Home page. Meanwhile click here to see pictures taken with this camera. |
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