Last Updated on February 24, 2022 by Practical Astrophotography Staff
About a week ago I received a production sample of the new ZWO ASI2600MM pro camera. This camera uses the Sony IMX571 APS-C monochrome sensor and that is a big deal in the amateur astrophotography community. Up until now, there were no options for APS-C mono sensors.
The sensor has no amp glow and it has a native 16bit ADC.
The camera has the familiar format of other full-size ZWO cameras. The body is identical to the 6200. The main exterior difference is the tilt plate which has an M42 connection as opposed to the m54 of the bigger full-frame brother. Other than that the bolt pattern is the same and that allowed me to attach my 7 position 2″ filter wheel loaded with Astrodon LRGB and Chroma 3nm narrowband.
Luckily the arrival of the camera did not trigger the usual month of cloudy weather and I was able to have two full nights of imaging with it.
I knew that I was going to use the camera at gain zero to take full advantage of the large full well of about 51K e-. I also settled on -10C and offset 40.
First thing I did was to ran the calibration frames through Pixinsight basic CCD parameters script and below is the screenshot of the numbers. They pretty much replicate the published specs except that the dark current measured just a bit higher. I am not sure why. This chart is taken at -10C.
After the first night of imaging, I was eager to process the data and see if everything calibrated out as it should and it did. These new CMOS sensors have really come a long way and the resulting data allows for deep stretches which is always nice.
Below are the three test images. Unfortunately, I had some equipment issues and for some reason, NINA seems to have a hard time nailing the focus with the TAK Epsilon. LDN1622 is especially soft but all three images, in general, don’t have sharp focus. This is of course no fault of the camera. The sky conditions were not optimal with wispy clouds from time to time, especially when shooting NGC2170 which is a tough target for us, being so far north. Also, I was not able to completely remove the astounding amount of satellites all going through the same orbit. I remember shooting the same object a few years ago and it didn’t seem as bad as it is now. More severe rejection parameters will probably take care of that.
Anyway here are the first images. I will be happy to answer any questions. In general, I’m very happy with this camera being a smaller version of the full-frame 6200. I plan to run the camera through the Sharcap parameters routine and I will post the resulting chart soon.
I wanted to keep this review brief and let the images speak for themselves. Keep in mind that these are relatively short integration times as I wanted to get a few images in.
Whats Included in the Box –
Price – $2,480.00
https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi2600mm-pro-mono
Available – Now
