Player One Neptune-C II color astro camera, Sony IMX178 sensor D=9 mm

Player One Neptune-C II color astro camera, Sony IMX178 sensor D=9 mm

The Player One Neptune-C II is a planetary camera developed by Player One Astronomy, which adopts the Sony IMX178 1/1.8" format sensor. The 2.4 µm pixel size accommodates a full well capacity of 15ke with a total of 6.4MP (the resolution is 3096*2078). The diagonal is 9mm. It features an UV/IR-cut protective glass.
With a 1/1.8 inch sensor, the Player One Neptune-C II is very suitable for sun and moon photography.

You can mount the Player One Neptune-C II camera to a telescope with an 1.25" or T-Mount, or add a Barlow lens between the camera and a telescope to extend the focal length for more details.
With a CS lens attached on the Player One Neptune-C II camera, it can be used as an all-day camera or meteor monitoring camera.

Sensor Tilt Plate
The built-in high-density sponge shading padblocks the light from the side without any leakage. When taking solar photograph with prominence telescope, Newton rings are annoying. The tilt plate helps avoiding this phenomenon.

256M DDR3 Cache
Player One Astronomy cameras are the first that adpot the DDR3 cache in all planetary cameras. DDR3 cache stabilizes data transmission, and effectively avoids frame dropping and greatly reduces read noise.
With the DDR3 cache, the camera does not have high demands on computing power any longer, it will still have excellent performance even if it is connected to a USB 2.0 port.

DPS technology
The planetary cameras from Player One Astronomy are equipped with the DPS (Dead Pixel Suppression) technology. The DPS analyses dark frames to find dead pixels and records the map in camera memory. During imaging, each frame, each frame is filtered to remove dead pixels.

Overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanism
The safety of your camera and other equipment is maintained through overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanisms.

Data Port
When the camera is connected to the USB 3.0 interface and the full-resolution preview is used, it can reach 93 FPS in RAW8 mode (10bit 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 to 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 to the corresponding port of your mount to do guiding.

Readout Noise
The readout noise valueas were obtained from actual tests.You can use Sharpcap 4 for testing. SC4 has a function called Sensor Analysis, providing a very simple way to test readout noise.

HCG Mode
The Player One Neptune-C II camera has a HCG mode, which will be automatically turned on when the camera gain setting is >30. The HCG mode can greatly reduce the readout noise and retain the same high dynamic range as the low conversion gain mode.

Camera
1.25" adapter and cover
Air blower
USB 3 cable
ST4 cable
2 mm hexagon wrench

Safety informations: PDF Download