The professional-grade ZWO ASI 2600 MM Pro monochrome cooled camera features a high-end, backlit Sony CMOS sensor, one of Sony's highest sensitivity and 16-bit colour depth (depth of field), the latest development. Although the use of colour cameras reduces the time and labour required for astronomical photography, with monochrome sensor cameras, with a little extra work, a nicer result can be achieved if you have the technical background and patience. It is advisable to combine your equipment with a motorised filter changer, as you will need a 3+1 filter shooting technique for successful shots.
The ZWO ASI 2600 MM Pro monochrome cooled camera features a special 23.5 x 15.7 mm (28.6 mm diagonal) CMOS sensor with APS-C sized high dynamic range backlighting, combining extra-low noise with powerful sensitivity. The sensor is made up of 3.76 micron pixels: this allows for an extremely high resolution. 16 bit ADC converter and QE sensitivity of over 91% promise extremely high performance in deep-sky photography.
The camera features a high-performance Peltier cooler that keeps the sensor at external temperatures as low as 35°C, so you can capture fine details of galaxies. To compensate for the high cooling capacity, the camera also boasts anti-fog heating. Even without cooling, the camera requires a 12V power supply with a minimum of 3A, so an external power supply is essential for operation.
The camera has a USB 3.0 connection, but it can also be operated with USB 2.0, but the former allows for much higher image transfer speeds, meaning that even with a larger image size, more shots can be captured in a given amount of time, which is justified by the 26 megapixel (6248 x 4176 pixels) sensor. The camera has a 512 MByte DDR memory buffer for stable, high-speed data transfer.
For image capture, a number of free software can be downloaded from the Internet, and for Windows we particularly recommend SharpCap and FireCapture. The camera requires Windows XP or later, but can be used under Linux and even has Macintosh support.
Included in the package:
- ASI 2600MM monochrome camera
- soft carrying case
- M48-M42 adapter
- 2m USB 3.0 cable
- T2-T2 21 mm extension cable
- T2-M48 16.5 mm extension-to-conversion adapter
- 2 inch dust cap
- 0.5 m USB 2.0 cable.
