Here are some images of and information about my Astrovid StellaCam II video camera. This camera is a Watec 120N CCD video camera with some added electronics enabling frame integration. The basic exposure time, which is fixed, is 1/60 of a second. The frame integration electronics allows an effective exposure time to be selected in powers of 2, up to a maximum of a factor of 512, or an exposure of 8.53 seconds. The control paddle also has gain (continuously variable), gamma (three settings), and frame freeze controls. The CCD chip is a Sony ICX418ALL with 768×494 pixels at 8.4×9.8 microns. I use a frame grabber PCMCIA card from ImperX to transfer the images from the camera to a laptop hard drive.

Click on the thumbnails for larger views.

This image shows the StellaCam II's diminutive size. It is essentially a 2-inch cube and very light. Every one of my eyepieces is heavier than this video camera.

This photo shows the front of the video camera. You can see the CCD chip.

Here is the back side, showing the control paddle plug, video out BNC, and power cord plug.

The reticle scale labels on this photo are hundredths of an inch. Each gradation is 1/1000 of an inch. This is a picture, taken through a handheld 50× microscope with the digital camera zoom set to 3×, of the edge of the video camera CCD. You can see the individual 8.4×9.8 micron pixels.

How did I take the previous picture? Well, here's how. The green tube is the 50× microscope. I mounted the digital camera on the mini-tripod in the foreground. Not the most stable of optical benches!

For solar observing, I pass the light through a narrowband interference filter. The filter is shown here (on the right), mounted in a 1” tube. The center wavelength is 5145 Å, and the FWHM is 30 Å.

This photo shows the video camera, narrowband filter tube, and 1.25-inch adapter.

Here we see the video camera in its solar observing configuration.