Pros and Cons of CCD Imager

Continuing the Pros and Cons of DSLR Astrophotography, Pros and Cons of CCD Imager is here. The chip of the DSLR is not as great as the specially designed CCD imager’s chip. Let’s look at its speciality!

Cooling system
Operating the imager under low temperature allows you to easily capture a library of fixed-temperature dark frames always needed in serious astrophotography.

Left: SBIG’s STL11000M

Noise is also significantly reduced becaused of the low temperature. There is a form of cooling called TEP (Thermo-Electric Power) fixing the temperature at a certain degree kevin. This is the best cooling system ever used.

Convenient
All of the imagers are controlled by a computer. You don’t have to click on the shutter or press on the bulb cable. As far as I know, every imagers are compatible on all of the commercial telescopes. Whenever you get a new scope, you don’t have to get an adapter.

Cost-saving
You could get a built-in autoguider imager to save the cost to buy a guide scope and a autoguider or another autoguiding capable imager. However, some of the autoguiding capable imagers are more expensive than the combo of guide scope and autoguider.

Antiblooming
Antiblooming is a must-have for long exposure imaging or the stars in the view will have long tails. Blooming is caused by the overwhelming photos in a pixel. Nevertheless, non antiblooming CCD has higher sentivity which shortens the exposure.

Others
Smaller chip is able to focus faster and transfer the data faster to the computer. B&W (Black & White/Monochrome) chip allows LRGB (Luminance, Red, Green and Blue) imaging by using a wheel of filters set and etc. B&W chip is always more sensitive than colour chip. Therefore, the photo by combining LRGB images into colour is more cheerful than one shot colour chip. A monochorme chip with a certain colour filter is more sensitive to that certain colour. It comes in handy to stress on certain features.

Cons
I would say that the only con of CCD imager is a large CCD chip is very expensive. Let’s say the SBIG’s STL11000XM Monochorme CCD imager. It costs USD10,000! It is possible to take a large image with a small imager by doing mosaic. It saves money but it takes time.