ATIK 383L+
I was very lucky to obtain the last camera Ian King had in stock from the first production batch and received it on 3rd April. Here are a few brief notes on my first week with the new camera. This will be a replacement for my Artemis 285 which been an excellent camera over the past 5 years. I intend to use the 383L+ binned 2x2 on my 14" which will be a good match for the 1.9m focal length and unbinned on my WO72FD at 432mm focal length.
The camera comes with a power supply in the US but not in Europe but is supplied
with a 12V car plug cable. A 2" to T-thread nosepiece is supplied but the
one with
my camera was much too tight to fit into my Moonlite focuser and had to be swapped
for a Revelation adaptor. There is a very solid machined T-threaded cover for
the front of the camera. A 3m USB lead is also in the box along with a driver
and software CD, quick start guide and booklet.
The camera drivers installed faultlessly on 2 laptops (XP & Vista) and 1
desktop (XP) but failed on my main XP desktop, I think because of a faulty USB
port on the front of the PC which I will check. I have been using the excellent Capture
software for a long time with the Art285, the latest upgrade on the CD is for
this camera.
Powering Up
I used the same 12V PC power supply that I have used for the Art285 to power the
camera up and this worked without problems in the house but where the cables run
close to a mains cable for my run-off shed I had bands on the images from
interference. This was solved by placing the power supply at the telescope
instead. Once powered up the cooling fan runs quietly and you can also hear the
unfamiliar click of the shutter opening and closing during exposures.
Cooling
The cooler reached 36C below ambient on a daytime test in a well ventilated
location with the ambient at 11C the camera reached a maximum -25.2C = 36.2
differential. The cooler very quickly reached the set point and held steady without
any problems.
Dark Frames
In the absence of any clear sky I made a couple of master dark frames created using a median combine with 30x2min
subs @-20C the 1x1 master has the following statistics as measured in AIP4WIN.
Minimum: 298.0, Maximum: 33407.0, Mean: 325.263, Median: 323.825, Std Dev: 30.7451
Here is a single Dark frame of
2min @1x1 binning and -20C
Here is a single Bias frame
@1x1 binning and -20C
Single 1x1 frames from the 383L are 16,665KB and 2x2 frames 4,169KB.
Download times from the camera are as advertised.
For first light I imaged NGC 4565 at 2x2 binning, unfiltered (until I modify my filter wheel), 166 minutes in 2-minute subs. Calibrated with bias, dark and flats, cooling was set at -20C. This galaxy only just fitted diagonally across the frame of the Art285 but sits comfortably in the centre of the 383L and shows the other galaxies in the field NGC 4562 (top left) and IC 3582 below centre. There appears to be a faint bloom(?) column of pixels from a 9th magnitude star just at the top of the field which is surprising. From my heavily light polluted location and the slightly hazy sky that night, the background was over 20K ADU! Use of a light pollution filter will be a must in future. The much larger CCD also reveals significant coma toward the edges of the frame, next purchase a Baader MPCC :-)
Click for a full-sized image.
After the first week and first light I'm very pleased with the camera. Exact comparison's are difficult but the background on subframes appear to be less noisy than the Art285. The larger imaging area is a delight to use, I'm looking forward to fitting objects like M81 on the frame with the 14".
M51
I took this image of M51 during some very hazy weather from11th April onward, not to mention the volcanic ash cloud overhead :-) but wasn't very happy with the result but after a lot of processing eventually here is the result. Binned 2x2 LRGB of 130:78:112:82 minutes in 2min subs. Astronomik type II 1.25" filters, 14" F5.2.
M3
Took this image of M3 with a total exposure of 53 minutes with the camera binned 2x2. LRGB 29:11:10:3 minutes. Mount problems and cloud interfering meant the blue channel only had 3 minutes exposure.
