Player One Astronomy Mars-M USB3.0 Mono Camera (IMX290)

Player One Astronomy Mars-M USB3.0 Mono Camera (IMX290)

Mars-M is a monochrome planetary camera developed by Player One Astronomy, which adopts the Sony IMX290 1/2.8″ CMOS, with a 1944 x 1096 array of 2.9 um pixels and the diagonal is 6.46 mm.

Mars-M is an monochrome camera with higher sensitivity than color cameras, you can get brighter image when you do planetary imaging.  In additional, the monochrome camera can get a sharper image because it does not need de-Bayer transformation. It is suitable for close-ups of the moon and sunspots.

Sensor Tilt Plate

When taking solar photograph with prominence telescope, the Newton ring is annoying. Smoother solar image without Newton ring could be taken by adjusting the focal plate. Besides, when you use a planetary camera for deep-sky lucky imaging, if you find the surrounding stars are not perfect, you can adjust the sensor tilt plate to obtain a flatter image field. get a much smaller field curvature of the telescope.

DDR3 256M

Player One Astronomy cameras are the first one who adpots the DDR3 cache in all planetary cameras in the world! It helps stabilize and secure data transmission, it effectively avoids frame dropping and greatly reduces readnoise.

With the DDR3 cache, the Mars-M camera does not have high demands on computing needs any longer, it will still has excellent performance even if it is connected to a USB 2.0 port.

DPS Technology

The planetary cameras from Player One Astronomy have DPS (Dead Pixel Suppression) technology. The DPS is anaylse many dark frames to find out thoes fixed abnormal pixel and record the map in camera memory. In imaging, each exposure frames, thoes position of dead pixels will be given a median value according to the active pixels around that abnormal pixel.

Overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanism

Player One cameras produced by the number one player ensures the safety of your camera and other equipment through overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanisms

Data Port

When the camera is connected to the USB3.0 interface and full-resolution preview is used, it can reach 136 FPS in RAW8 mode (10bit ADC), and the frame rate in RAW16 mode (12bit ADC) is 64 frames per second. 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 that you 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 and the AUTO GUIDE port of the equatorial mount to do guiding.

Performance