Posted by Martin Mobberley at 20:01 on 2014 Jan 11
Paul,I used an MX916 CCD during the 1990s and up to 2002, mainly with a 49cm Newtonian and a 16cm f/3.6 reflector. It was reliable and images could be taken without any dark frames, which was just as well as there was nointernal shutter, so dark frames would have been a hassle. Since then I’ve mainly used an SBIG ST9XE. I switched to the SBIG camera for a number of reasons. The raw images were much noisier, but once a dark frame was subtracted they were noticeably deeper, and the SBIG has a built in shutter.But I think the main reason I switched was that at the time I far preferred the CCDSoft software which integrated with The Sky planetarium package. Initially there was no third party software for the MX916 and the supplied software was very clunky indeed. Of course the MX916 of the1990s had parallel port download too which was very slow. Nevertheless, I had very reliable service from the MX916 over many years and it was very reasonably priced, without the painful ‘one dollar equals one pound’ rip-off price that we have to put up with so frequently in the UK!!Martin