SAC10 arrived

Hi all,

I thought some of you would be interested to know that I got my SAC10 yesterday.

It looks like SAC are getting back to normal after a few problems last year.

The camera itself is small and light at about 3" by 2". Control box is also smaller than a cigarette packet.

Hope to get some shots in this weekend if the weather continues to come from the east.

Later,

Jed.

wow the specs on that !

Im looking forward to see the images

Hi Jed,
I have to say I'm very impressed with the price of the camera compared to the sbig st10 which has the same number of pixels.
What kind of software do you get with it, do you have figures for its quantum efficiency?
The pixels are also half the size of the st-10 pixels, this is good and bad, you get great resolution at the cost of a smaller field of view.

In the case of my 12" F10, this extra resolution would be lost for deep sky imaging as it would be much finer then the seeing would allow, so I'd be using focal reducers there permanently, BUT if you could use it on planets, it would yield much finer images then the toucam as the toucam pixels are 5.6um. Can you get streaming bmps from the sac10?

All the same Jed, we're all looking forward to what you can get out of it.

Hi Jed,
What kind of software do you get with it, do you have figures for its quantum efficiency?
The pixels are also half the size of the st-10 pixels, this is good and bad, you get great resolution at the cost of a smaller field of view.

In the case of my 12" F10, this extra resolution would be lost for deep sky imaging as it would be much finer then the seeing would allow, so I'd be using focal reducers there permanently, BUT if you could use it on planets, it would yield much finer images then the toucam as the toucam pixels are 5.6um. Can you get streaming bmps from the sac10?

Hi Dave,

The Sony data sheet does not give QE figures or well depth.

So far as I can see the image capture software Nebulosity does not allow AVI capture, but I have asked the question and will keep you all posted on this.

The SAC10 will give about 1.5 arc second per pixel on my Williams optics ZS80 and .5 on the 11" at F5 and F6.3. I can however bin the output, but was planning on seeing how far I could get with the 350D on the 11".

Later,

Jed.

Unfortunatly the SAC10 I have been sent is broken and I have to send it back for it to be fixed.

So I will have to wait another couple of weeks at least now.

Ho Hum.

Later,

Jed.

Here is some data from the SAC group on the SAC10

=====================================

The SAC10 is a work in progress. It started out as only a 3.3mega
pixel color one shot. We went from a 12bit ADC to a 16bit ADC and
have been working on the microprocessor controller and analog front
end for sometime now. There are many constraints to what we are
doing. We want to give the best performance and yet keep the cost
down. We have size and power requirements. This has lead to some
innovation in how we are doing the SAC10. This has also lead to the
delays as I am not willing to compromise the performance in lieu
cost. There are basically 6 versions planned for the SAC10 line. 4
versions which will have an interchangeable front end to the camera.
These versions are as follows:

SAC10-262
CCD - ICX262AQF
Peak QE% ~ 40% at 550nm
Full well depth ~ 15K -e un-binned
Readout noise ~ 10 -e rms
System gain ~ .4 -e / ADU (maximum system gain is variable as well as
ADC offset)
ABG overload ~ 600X

========================================

Later,

Jed.