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Building a lightweight widefield rig - advise on camera

ZWO ASI2600MM Pro Equipment CMOS
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Christian Bennich avatar
Christian Bennich avatar
Hi All

I have begun building a more lightweight rig for widefield imaging.

My mount is the IOptron Gem28. 
I have a Samyang 135mm that I will start with on the mount, but I imagine that the Gem28 can also help carry smaller refractors, maybe up to 500mm FL. 

I am looking at different mono cameras, and as I already own a 2600MM, I was thinking to get another one. I do realise that at short FL I will massive undersampled, but drizzling was very good at regaining details. 
As I would like to stay with ZWO to be able to use my ASIAIR, I think that the 2600MM is the best "trade-off" between pixel size, sampling and quality of the optics etc. and will allow me to go all the way up to +1000mm with binning. 

IF not the 2600 - which other - Full Frame is over what I want to pay in my part of the world and with my seeing etc. etc. 

Any suggestions or thoughts that I should consider?

Thank you in advance!
Rob avatar
Rob avatar
The GEM28 will easily handle refractors up to about 500mm focal length.  I ran mine with an AT115EDT on it, but with a mini-pier extension to avoid hitting the tripod legs.

Right now, the 2600mm is likely your best ZWO non-full frame mono camera option.  The 533MM would be close but with wide field in mind, you'd want the larger sensor.   I think he IMX571 is a good option for 300-500mm wide field imaging, particularly with not the greatest seeing.
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Christian Bennich avatar
Christian Bennich avatar
Thank you, @Rob, for your feedback!
My average seeing is between 2"-4" in my Bortle 4/5-ish skies, so not too bad - but not excellent either.
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Tom Gray avatar
Tom Gray avatar
Hi Christian, you have some nice hardware. I successfully image on a super portable rig based on Star Adventurer mount, Samyang 135mm for widefield or Zenithstar 80 II ED (436mm with reducer), RPi4 single board computer running Stellarmate OS (5v) and can achieve 5-10 min exposures when carefully balanced. More info here. Good luck with your setup. I use a 183 M and OSC camera - well suited to the Samyang with small 2.4 micron pixels
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Quinn Groessl avatar
Quinn Groessl avatar
I’d go with the 2600mm or mc if you want OSC. At that wide of field sampling is overrated.