Sierra Skies Observatory Meade DSI II Color Astronomical CCD Camera

My initial foray into astro-imaging (circa late 2007 and early 2008) was with the Meade DSI II Color and Meade DSI II Pro (monochrome) cameras. You can see how small these cameras are in the above photo. The chip size is 8 mm diagonal (i.e., very small), and has a resolution of 752x582. The small size of the chip - and using a poorly polar-aligned scope - makes it very difficult to actually find an object and put it on the chip. I needed to use the finder scope quite frequently in order to accomplish this. The pixel size of these cameras is 8.3x8.6 microns, which makes a plate scale of about 0.5 arcseconds per pixel with my 12" LX200R. I used the Meade software to control the camera; at the time, I was taking exposures of only 10-30 seconds (!), which was about the best I could do with tracking at that time. I should note that I WAS using a wedge, so the scope was polar aligned (as opposed to an alt-az mount, which would create star trails unless a de-rotator is used). I used the DSI II Color camera with Meade software, and got my first results with astro-imaging.


The back of the camera has what looks like a fancy heat sink, but no internal cooling. There are external "outback" coolers that have been made for these cameras, but I'm not sure that they actually control the chip temperature (I think they cool the entire camera).
	Here, you can see the front of the camera with a 2" adapter for insertion into the focuser. On the left side you can (barely) see the USB connector that is the only hookup to this camera - it powers the camera, controls the camera, and provides a path for downloading images from the carmera.
Here, looking into the camera from the front, you can see the (small) CCD chip. There is an IR filter over the chip to remove longer wavelengths that could "bloat" star images.
	At left you see the specificaions for the DSI II Color camera from Meade.

Meade DSI II Color

Inexpensive Color CCD Camera