Player One Astronomy Apollo-M MINI USB3.0 Mono Camera (IMX429)

Player One Astronomy Apollo-M MINI USB3.0 Mono Camera (IMX429)

Apollo-M MINI is a solar camera developed by Player One Astronomy, which adopts the Sony IMX429 2/3” format monochrome sensor. The 4.5um pixel size accommodates a well depth of 24.8k e- with a total of 2.8MP (the resolution is 1944*1472), and the diagonal is 11mm.

Pregius Technology

MX429 sensor is based on Pregius 3rd Generation. According to the introduction of technical documents, pixel size of 3rd Gen usually is 4.5um, and full well is 25Ke-

Format

IMX429 has 2/3″ format, this size is between IMX178 and IMX174.

Pixel Size

4.5um pixel size is smaller than IMX174 camera, which means it can works provide higher resolution in same focal length.

HCG

Apollo-M MINI has HCG mode, when Gain>71 HCG will open automatically.

2nd Gen – Sensor Tilt Plate

Passive Cooling System

Solar cameras working in daylight, temperature could be much higher than night. Heat of global shutter sensors will be a problem, especially some big format like IMX432. Player One add a new features called Passive Cooling System to conduct the heat from the sensor out.

DDR3 256M

Player One Astronomy cameras are the first one who adpots the DDR3 cache in all planetary cameras in the world! It helps stabilize and secure data transmission, it effectively avoids frame dropping and greatly reduces readnoise.

With the DDR3 cache, the camera does not have high demands on computing needs any longer, it will still has excellent performance even if it is connected to a USB 2.0 port.

DPS Technology

The planetary cameras from Player One Astronomy have DPS (Dead Pixel Suppression) technology. The DPS is anaylse many dark frames to find out thoes fixed abnormal pixel and record the map in camera memory. In imaging, each exposure frames, thoes position of dead pixels will be given a median value according to the active pixels around that abnormal pixel

Overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanism

Player One cameras produced by the number one player ensures the safety of your camera and other equipment through overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanisms

Data Port

When the camera is connected to the USB3.0 interface and full-resolution preview is used, it can reach 84 FPS in RAW8 mode (12bit ADC). When recording images, since the actual writing speed will be affected by the writing speed of the hard disk itself, when the hard disk writing speed is slow, the recording may not reach the theoretical speed. It is recommended that you use a high-quality solid state drive to record data to give full play to the performance of the camera.

Use the ST4 guide cable to connect the camera and the AUTO GUIDE port of the equatorial mount to do guiding.

Performance