Orion Starshoot Pro V1 CCD Camera
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The Orion Starshoot Pro is an older one-shot color (OSC) thermoelectrically cooled CCD camera. My Starshoot Pro is the original version of the camera. Orion also marketed a version 2 with a few enhancements, but it was still basically the same camera. Orion no longer sells either Starshoot Pro.
The best feature of this camera is the 28.4mm diagonal APS size Sony ICX413AQ SuperHAD CCD. It is a 6.15 megapixel sensor with 7.8 micron square pixels. There are two main issues with this camera: no set-point cooling and random 9-pixel dashes dropout artifacts across downloaded images when the download speed is set too high. On the SSPRO the download speed is adjustable in a range of 1 to 8 and because of the dropouts I was forced to download at a very slow speed 2 to avoid them. But I was able to cure the issue by installing a USB 3.0 controller card in my observatory workstation. I had read that some USB 2.0 devices can get a boost on a USB 3.0 card (maybe a bigger buffer?), so even though the SSPRO is a USB 2.0 device, the USB 3.0 port virtually eliminated the dashes. Even at the highest SSPRO download speed of 8 only rarely did I find any dropouts. Not sure if this fix works for others but it works for me. |
I later discovered that although the USB 3.0 port solved my download dropout issue, there is still another artifact issue related to download speeds, that only shows up at the very highest speeds. This is detailed on the Noise Reduction Mod page. I finally settled on speed 5 as the best compromise, which is still much faster than the speed 2 that I was limited to before adding the USB 3.0 ports.
Even though the camera has thermoelectric cooling it does not have set-point control of the CCD temperature, so I modified my camera to add set-point control. With a set temperature I can build a dark frame library and not have to capture new dark frames with every set of images. The mod is detailed on a separate page linked below.
I also added noise filtering to the PCB to reduce electronic camera noise which is detailed on the Noise Reduction Mod page.
A third issue I have is no INDI driver for the camera to operate under Linux, so I'm no longer using the SSPRO with my new astrophoto setup.
Even though the camera has thermoelectric cooling it does not have set-point control of the CCD temperature, so I modified my camera to add set-point control. With a set temperature I can build a dark frame library and not have to capture new dark frames with every set of images. The mod is detailed on a separate page linked below.
I also added noise filtering to the PCB to reduce electronic camera noise which is detailed on the Noise Reduction Mod page.
A third issue I have is no INDI driver for the camera to operate under Linux, so I'm no longer using the SSPRO with my new astrophoto setup.
More photos and the modifications to the camera are detailed on these separate project pages.
Debayering SSPRO Images
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I was using DeepSkyStacker (DSS) software to process my images from the SSPRO and I was getting weird colors using the Bayer pattern shown on the ICX413AQ CCD datasheet. So I ran some tests to determine the correct Bayer pattern to choose in DSS.
At left is the Bayer pattern as shown on the Sony datasheet. From the drawing it appears the bayer pattern is GBRG, but it's not. |
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To get the correct debayer pattern the spec sheet image needs to be rotated 90° clockwise. So in DSS choose RGGB to debayer the colors correctly.
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Below are examples of debayering with the four generic options available in DSS, to show how the debayering process affects image colors. I kind of like those green and purple nebulas, but RGGB is the pattern that gives the correct colors for the Starshoot Pro.
RGGB - the colors are correctly debayered
BGGR - red and blue are transposed
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GBRG - has swapped green with both red and blue.
GRBG - both red and blue are again replaced by green
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Page created 11/28/2017
Last update 05/13/2023
Last update 05/13/2023
