QHY5L-II C planetary camera

Introducing the QHY5L-II C planetary camera from QHYCCD

The QHY5L-II C Series uncooled cameras fit in a standard 1.25-inch eyepiece holder and have an adjustable location ring for confocality with an eyepiece. They are ideal for use as low-weight autoguider or planetary camera where short exposures are typical.  The cameras come in very small but powerful packages! The improved thermal design allows the heat generated by the CMOS sensor to be transferred externally to the telescope’s eyepiece tube. This particular camera is the “C” or color model.

QHY5L-II C is one of our most popular guide cameras, it has high sensitivity, an exceptional 74% QE, and low noise. The read noise is remarkably low (~ 4 electrons) and the on-chip FPN (Fixed Pattern Noise) calibration function solves one of the major problems of CMOS technology, resulting in images that are clear and uniform, even under high gain. With these advantages, the QHY5L-II provides outstanding image quality for planetary imaging, autoguiding, deep-sky and all-sky imaging.  Available in color and monochrome versions. The sensor has 1280 x 960 pixels at 3.75um and the camera is capable of 30 FPS in high resolution mode, 106 FPS in VGA mode.

Planetary Camera

With a frame rate range of between 30 and 106 frames, the QHY5L-II C camera is an instrument best suited for capturing planetary images. Although high frame rates help reduce the amount of atmospheric agitation that influences the image, they also result in short exposure times.

Lunar Imaging

The QHY5L-II C also makes achieving high resolution lunar images a simple task. Image stacking will result in highly detailed images of the lunar surface.

Deep Sky Imaging

Even though the QHY5L-II is not a cooled camera, it still has the capacity to take bright images of deep sky objects. This is especially true of small galaxies and planetary nebulae. Ordinarily, this can be done via short exposures and large quantity stacking. You may have to enable EZPlanetary’s auto-dark frame subtract function to get concurrent dark frame calibration to eliminate the thermal noise on images with long exposure times. Please note you will need to reload the auto-dark frame calibration if you have altered the gain or exposure time.

AutoGuiding

The QHY5L-II is an acclaimed autoguiding camera. In 2015, QHY came out with a miniGuideScope made specifically for QHY5L-II cameras. This can be found in the accessories section. The QHY5L-II is compact and lightweight, making it the perfect camera component of an ultra portable guide system. The monochrome version has a 74% high QE and you can locate the guidestar anywhere.