Planetary Imaging Taken to the Next Level

My lovely wife offered to let me buy myself something astronomy related for my birthday this month and I quickly realised that £1,299 for an AZ-EQ6 Mount was probably not what she had in mind. I therefore decided to upgrade my Planetary Camera from the modified Xbox Webcam I had been using. I did a fair amount of searching across the web and decided that the best value camera I could see whas the QHY5L-II which comes in either colour or mono versions.

To be honest I did debate about getting a mono version as people do say it can provide a better image but I decided there were to many issues with going the mono route. For example, I would need to buy a filter wheel and LRGB filters which would probably have doubled the cost at least. But more imporantly, the time taken to image is longer and with the weather here in Scotland being crap, I just felt I could capture more with the colour version.

There are some nice little perks with this camera, the main one being it comes with a parfocal ring so I can try and ensure that it will focus at the same point as my reticle eyepiece. This should hopefully make it much easier to locate and center objects for imaging purposes. A 2nd aspect that I like is that the QHY5L-II gets a positive write up in regards to guiding which is something I hope to do once I can get an EQ mount.

Now I am just hoping the weather will clear up in the next day or so which would enable me to properly test it out.