Orion G3 Mono for spectroscopy

I just purchased an Orion G3 Mono and thought I would write this mini Orion G3 Monochrome CCD review.

As many of you know I am pretty fascinated with spectroscopy, or the use of the spectrum of light emitted by or reflected off an object to determine its chemical makeup. I have been working on this with a DSLR for a while and it does a fairly good job for just getting my feet wet. Unfortunately the filters on the sensor of a DSLR skew the results pretty badly towards the red end, and the sensor is too sensitive to certain colors (trying to make up for the way the human eye sees).

Spectrums of various stars

I had been told that the way to do it with more accuracy is to use a monochrome CCD. One of the more popular ones to start out with in these types of spectroscopy seems to be the Orion CCD cameras including the Orion G3 Mono, so I bought one. Some nice advantages are that this camera is only about $499 retail (cheaper on Amazon) so it is fairly inexpensive as far as CCDs are concerned, it is very small and light weight, it has cooling built in so the images have less noise than an uncooled camera, and it has a 1.25″ threaded nosepiece so the grating filter I use will screw right onto it.

Orion G3 Mono

I plan on redoing all my spectral images with the Orion G3 Mono and comparing my results from it to what I achieved with my DSLR. It will be interesting to see how close they are. I may even leave the DSLR images up so you can see the comparison for yourself.

The first few runs with the camera have proven hopeful. I am not too sure I like the software which comes with it so I am going to try it with my standards imaging software and see what happens. More to come!

You can get more information, read more reviews, or purchase this monochrome CCD.


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