Starfish PRO
  More Information

 Starfish
  Features
  Image Gallery
  MAW Presentation
  Spec Sheet
  Sensitivity Data
  Sensor Data Sheet
  Sensor Product Flyer
  Starfish FAQ S
  Starfish User Manual
  Competitive Comparison
 Ordering Information
  Starfish Standard
  Starfish Guider
   

 

 

Starfish Camera Front
Starfish Camera Back
 

Large Format Image Sensor - the Starfish camera uses a 1.3 MPixel (1280 x 1024) image sensor for truly large field of views compared to other cameras in this price range. This makes it far more suitable for lunar imaging applications. Also, when used as a guider the larger FOV will permit you to find far more suitable guide stars than competing cameras. Support for sub-frame regions allows for faster frame rates and reduce storage for those times that the full frame FOV is not necessary.

Monochrome Image Sensor - provides a full resolution image at 1.3 Mpixels. No resolution robbing bayer color filters like one-shot color cameras. Image sensor light sensitivity is excellent with a QE specification of 56%.

USB 2.0 Interface - driven by a hardware DMA engine allows for burst pixels rates of over 12Mpixels / second. That's 12 million 16bit pixels per second.

Integrated ST-4 Style Guide Port - the Starfish camera has an integrated guide port interface for direct connection to most telescope mounts that support the ST-4 style guider interface. Included status LED's give you a visual indication of guide corrections as they are sent. There is no need to resort to serial RS-232 interfaces to the mount which cannot provide timely guide corrections to the mount controller or buy separate guider hardware interfaces and worry about software integration problems. In addition, the camera includes proprietary pulse guiding circuitry to accurately generate guide commands to your mount. No more worries that your laptop may not be fast enough to run your guide program accurately enough for consistant guiding results.

Integrated Frame Buffer and Image Processing - The camera includes an integrated Frame Buffer that effectively decouples the operations of reading pixel data from the image sensor and uploading the image to your computer. This allows you to be able run other programs on your computer without having to worry about dropped image frames because your CPU was busy. To further offload the image processing tasks to the camera, we have included dedicated image processing hardware that handles low-level processing tasks like bias frame subtraction and read noise reduction algorithms that dramatically improve the image quality of your captured images.

Excellent Performance as a Planetary Imager - The Starfish includes features that webcams and even competing high-end planetary imager cameras don't offer. Things like TEC cooling of the image sensor, true 10 bit pixel data that is uncompressed, long exposures (up to 5min), and fast frame rates to make the most of your planetary imaging sessions.

Serial RS-232 Port - integrated into the camera that allows interface to external filter wheels and focuser assemblies. You no longer have to worry that your computer doesn't support a serial interface or worry about another long cable running between your mount and the computer.

Broad Software Support - The Starfish camera is supported by many of the popular camera control programs in use today. Included with each camera is Stark Labs Nebulosity and PHDGuiding programs. For Mac OS X users, we also supply our own StarLink application. For the PC platform, we provide camera plugins for the popular CCDSoft and MaximDL programs. Lastly, we provide a software development kit for both the PC and Mac platforms, for those individuals that need to write their own applications.

Quality Design and Construction - the Starfish is designed, assembled and tested in our facility in Santa Maria, California. Fishcamp engineering has years of experience designing cameras for demanding industrial applications and now we bring this experience to the amateur astronomy market. We personally assure that each camera sold will be the best quality you can buy for the money.

Copyright © 2009. All rights reserved.