Player One Saturn-C SQR camera

Player One is a relatively new player in the astronomy camera market. The one thing I liked in the Player One offer, is the selection of the sensors used in their cameras. This manufacturer does not apply each new sensor carelessly, rather every Player One camera is a thoughtful construction with a selected sensor model, that has already proven to work well for astrophotography amateurs.

I decided to check personally how things are in Player One and purchased a camera based on the well-known IMX533 color sensor. Two models are offered – the cooled Ares Pro and the uncooled Saturn SQR – for my needs I selected the cheaper and smaller one 🙂

IMX533 sensor itself is a real working horse with high sensitivity, low noise, and zero amp glow. Player One engineers ramp it up to another level and the Saturn-C camera offers 73Ke pixel depth and 43fps at full resolution (RAW8 mode).

There are several IMX533-based cameras already on the market, but most of them are with active cooling, so they are bulky and expensive. So why even bother with the uncooled version? It can be used as a planetary camera – relatively big pixels are suitable for larger telescopes, and high resolution allows it to cover large fragments of the lunar or solar surface. And another area where Saturn-C can be an expert is of course deep sky object imaging with lucky imaging technique and electronically assisted astronomy (EAA) with live stacking as well.

Saturn-C SQR camera’s external size is the same as standard planetary or guiding cameras but what is impressive is the actual sensor size, which is significantly larger than small planetary chips. Its diagonal is 16mm. It is enough to cover the whole solar or lunar disc with a telescope of a focal length of 1100-1200mm. With a 3000mm focal length instrument it is enough to capture only nine panels to mosaic the full disc.

The external camera shape is no boring cylinder, but a bit more exciting hexagon. Saturn-C camera (along with a few other uncooled Player One cameras) is equipped with PSC – a passive cooling system that transfers the heat from the sensor to the camera enclosure. There is an additional radiator with a fan available that allows to reduce the camera temperature further down. This system is called ACS – the active cooling system.

The image above was made with a Player One Saturn-C camera and Celestron SCT 8″ telescope with a 0.63x focal reducer. The effective focal length was 1300mm and only a small piece of the solar disc was out of the frame, so two panels mosaic needed to be captured.

The Moon image below is only a single frame captured with the same telescope – since the Moon was near the first quarter it did fit diagonally to the large IMX533 sensor field of view.

Two close-ups of the Moon’s surface above were captured again with the SCT 8″ telescope, but this time the focal reducer was replaced with a Barlow lens, and the effective focal length was about 3200mm. The seeing was not perfect during this session, but still, some large areas of the Moon can be recorded and presented in a single shot.

Another area of interest for the Saturn-C camera is deep sky imaging of course. Despite the fact the camera is not cooled, it is suitable for both short-exposure lucky imaging and also standard long-exposure deep sky imaging. Some first attempts are presented below. Askar FMA230 small telescope was used for these tests.

The first two images are stacks of short 4s exposures. The following three images are stacks of 1-minute sub-exposures. M44 contains 45 subframes, and Auriga and Alnitak are stacks of 90 subframes.

All the deep sky images above were captured under my suburban sky with NELM about 4.5-5.0 magnitude, so there is definitely much room to improve with regard to conditions. But the camera itself has proven its quality and also met my expectations.

Last but not least – the software works just fine. Both ASCOM driver controlled with Sequence Generator Pro, and also SharpCap software with native driver read data from the camera fast and without any problems.

I have also done a sensor analysis with SharpCap software and the results are as presented by the manufacturer. Read noise drops to about 1e for high gains that can be used for planetary imaging. A bit lower gains in the range of 200-300 can be used for lucky imaging – the read noise is still very low, but the full well capacity is much larger, so the dynamic range also reaches here an impressive 11-12 stops.