An Advanced Astro Camera | ZWO ASi 2600MC Review

this is the zwo ASI 2600 MC Pro a cooled dedicated deep Sky camera made for Astro photography a few months ago ZW sent this camera to me and asked for review and now it's time for the verdict [Music] this video will not be about camera specs you can look all of those up on the web anyways this video will be about my experiences with this camera in combination with my rig that is why I will first show you the images I've taken with it and talk about the way I captured them each one of these four Images actually highlight something I want to talk about some people also wanted a comparison with the qhy268c which I also reviewed that will happen in the end I am showing you these images in order of how much I like them which means that this first image in my opinion is kinda garbage [Music] foreign this is the first image I took with this camera and it highlights the first problems I had the equipment was a small quadruplet refractor and a multi narrowband filter the optilon lxt stream first ignore the diffraction spikes an experiment which I will not do again only for one more image I combined three minute exposures 42 of them and the gain was set to 100. the detail in the nebulosity looks really great big plus keeping in mind only two hours of exposure time you might already see some artifacts at the edge of the image I had to crop this image quite a lot because this camera is too big for the usual one and a quarter inch filters you have to use a 2 inch filter which puts another price tag on the line the stars in the Stacked image look great no under sampling thanks to small pixels this camera and a small refractor a good combination foreign the equipment same as before we all love the Pleiades but these color gradients are awful there can be three reasons for that a bad filter a camera with bad sensitivity or not enough exposure time the filter was again a one and a quarter inch one that definitely made it worse but was it the sensitivity or not enough exposure time you tell me when I tell you that this image was made of 20 times 300 second exposures only 1.6 hours of Total integrated exposure time which is not much but still look at this nebulosity ignore this mess over here let's post production I may have over edited this image a bit too much sadly I couldn't get more exposure time but the camera definitely delivered [Music] I am really in a split opinion about this image and will definitely re-edit it at some point I don't like the colors but that's not due to the camera at this point zwo was kind enough to send me a two inch multi-nurban filter so we are done with gradients and artifacts finally the stars in the center of the image look beautiful and for transparency I will show an image before I applied blower exterminator the stars are well sampled maybe a tad bit oversampled due to the small pixels the equipment was a medium-sized druplet refractor with a field flattener and the zwo two inch dual narrowband filter yes only never banned on Galaxies is not a good idea but I had no other option I combined 120 exposures each of them three minutes long and the gain again 100. for a total exposure time of 6 hours the stars are a tiny bit oversampled due to the small pixels if you use a medium to big size telescope you might have some blurry stars and you might need to sharpen in post-processing and second think about this three minute explosions from a bottle 6 to 7 backyard six hours of these explosions and you can still see some of the famous integrated flux nebula this is my most recent image up to this date but there is one more a few months ago when the knights were still long and dark and cold in Winter I used the two inch narrowband filter on something in Orion foreign [Music] love how this image turned out the flame nebula should have been a bit more yellow in my opinion but that's due to the filter not the camera the equipment once again was a small quadruplet reflector and the zw202 inch dual narrowband filter I shot 35 images with 300 seconds of exposure time and the gain again 100. only about three hours and this image crashed to my previous version which had 4 hours we can see so much in the velocity there is no question about it this camera delivers for me there are only two ways to compare a dedicated Astro cams sensor specs and ease of use since the qhy268c and this camera have the same sensor they will perform very similar when it comes to Quantum efficiency full well capacity blah blah blah so let's start connectivity they both need two inch filters that's a fact but seasoned zwo users like me are used to the simple way of an ASI air attach plugin and you are ready to go the 268c will need a laptop outside which means also a small table and protection against the elements if you are comfortable with having a table and all these accessories outside the differences between these two cameras are a minuscule but even with a laptop outside I will tend to watch the ASI 2600 because of these extra USB ports in the back for a guide camera and possibly a focuser plus the connection system on the 268c this adapter ring solution was kind of garbage the zwo ASI 2600 is an advanced dedicated deep Sky camera if you have some experience in astrophotography and want to upgrade from a DSLR or from an earlier version of any zwo camera this is an awesome choice if you have any more questions or feedback feel free to leave them in the comments down below I will have to let this camera go at some point and return to Maya 294 but that is not really an issue because if you work hard enough you can get the most amazing images out of almost every setup let's say you sank 40 hours into an ha RGB mosaic of Andromeda Galaxy foreign [Music]

Channel: AstroAddict

Views: 9,306

Keywords: Astrophotography;, astronomy;, telescopes;, omegon;, universe;, stars;, skywatcher;, altair, astro;, phd2, deep sky astrophotography, autoguiding, hubble, zwo, camera, asi 2600

Id: Caw1BYSy5K0

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2023