From: "matt carmine" <jim_chung@sunshine.net>

Date: March 17, 2012 7:25:54 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Maaaars!

I was doubly blessed last night.  Thin scattered clouds that plagued us at sunset cleared by 10 pm and good to very good seeing ensued well past midnight.  This was also one of those rare opportunities when buying astro tech where it definitely pays to live in Canada.  I ordered the Flea3 with the ICX618 sensor from PGR on Thursday morning and they FedEx shipped it that afternoon from Vancouver.  I got it Friday morning, what service!

I was happy with the imaging results:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4852049/MarsMarch16RGB.jpg

The ICX618 is apparently the most sensitive sensor out there and very popular as such.  I'm not sure I noticed a large difference in that regard with the Scorpion.  It does seem to be less noisy so I can apply higher gains more easily.  And I do get to shoot at a real 30 fps since the ROI'd Scorpion tops out at around 24 fps?  I even tried 60 fps last night but had to half the size of the video frame to achieve the bandwidth under Firewire400.

Which got me thinking.  My Macbook Pro is 6 years old now.  If I bought a new one which has the Firewire800 port, I could achieve higher fps without fiddling under Format7.  They also come with SD card slots so would it be advantageous to write data direct to the card - would it have faster write times than to the HD?

Jim