Moravian CCD G3-16200 cooled camera

Here comes the G3-16200 camera with the new KAF-16200 CCD sensor. While other astronomical cameras use CCD chips primarily designed for different application fields, KAF-16200 has “astronomy imaging” stated as the primary application in its birth certificate.

• Sensor dimensions 27.2 × 21.8 mm (35 mm diagonal) are designed for 2" focusers and correctors, often using M42 or M48 threads.

• Sensor aspect ratio 5:4 is very close to square to optimally fit aberration-free circle within the field of view, but also prolonged enough to allow optimal composition of frame, required by astro-imagers.

• Sensor can be used with 2" filters (od unmounted D50mm filters), which are more common and affordable compared to square 50 × 50mm filters. Also more filters can fit into the same filter wheel and the G3 design allow usage of internal filter wheel (the G4 cameras can use external filter wheels only, as the 50 × 50mm filters are too big to fit into camera head).

• 6 × 6μm pixels perfectly correspond to the typical focal lengths of amateur telescopes (between 50 and 150cm). Smaller pixels limit dynamic range and sensitivity at no added value, because resolution is limited by seeing (air turbulences) and optics, rather than by pixel size. At the same time greater pixels could provide under-sampled images if optics is good, mount perfectly tracks the stars and seeing is above average.

• Read noise around 10e-RMS is well beyond the sky background noise in the case of long exposures, even if the very best narrow-band filters are used (no to mention standard RGB filters).

• Dark current below 0.1 e-/s/px at 0 °C allows very long exposures, providing the sensor is used in camera allowing for proper cooling (like the G3-16200).

• Quantum efficiency reaching 60% surpasses the QE of very popular KAF-8300 CCD and is almost identical to e.g. KAF-16803. So it definitely allows capturing of stunning astrophotographs.