You can see the cmos clearly by clicking for a larger image. Yes, I mean very clear and large.
I was so happy to see the QHY5 arrived at my doorstep on 13 July 2007. This CMOS camera is designed by Prof. Qiu Hong-Yun for autoguiding and planetary imaging. Its violet hue metallic casing looks very nice and solid. It has a IR filter attached. Below the filter is the CMOS which has 1.30Mpixels and each pixel has an area of 5.2µm x 5.2µm. It has a guider port and a USB port. There’s a red LED too.
2 ports and 1 LED on the bottom of QHY5
Anyway, review on this cmos camera will be made within one weeks time. The curse of new equipment has come, the weather has changed to hazy. A lot of amateur astronomers have this weather curse (normally, cloudy days) after they got their new equipments but mine is due to the forest burning in Indonesia.
To master your imaging platform, you’ll have to know the resolution of your setup. The setup mentioned is consisted of a telescope optical tube assembly (OTA), a mount and a camera.
Let’s say, if your setup’s resolution is sub arcsec/pixel (less than 1 arcsec/pixel), you need a very stable and precise mount, usually a high end German Equatorial Mount (GEM), for this. As the resolution is higher (the lower the value of arcsec/pixel), your setup is more sensitive to vibration, atmostpheric turbulence, wind, flexure between optical tube and GEM head and the mis-polar-alignment. In a simple phrase, the margin of error is limited.
Therefore, before you start taking image, you should know the highest possible resolution of your setup so that you do not end up with a imaging resolution that exceeded the conditions allowed. Nobody likes poor quality photo. Well, let’s get into the math part.
To calculate the resolution, follow the simple formula:
Resolution (arcsecond) = [CCD Pixel Size (in micron) ÷ Focal Length (mm)] * 205
Credit to Webfoot at Cloudy Nights forum for providing this formula. 
Isn’t it a GoTo telescope is capable of tracking celestial objects? Why do I need the autoguiding? ![:-\](http://www.astronomynotes.net/smilies/yahoo_question.gif ":-\")
At first, tracking is just similiar to guiding. For instance in the Autostar Suite from Meade, tracking allows you to define a bright spot (centroid) that it (Autostar Suite) will use to anchor images when combining (stacking) them into one image.
Continue reading ‘Autoguiding By Imager’
