I bought a "new" QHY8 OSC camera (i think is a third or fourth hand one) for a very chip price and everything now is changed!

With this warm bubbles that come from Africa here in Calabria temperature upped to 45° C. In this nights seeing was really poor due for Sahara desert dust.

Last night sky was really poor, the Milkyway wasn't visible and seemed to be in a high light polluted big city but i was too much curious to see how this "new" camera worked.

Since i'm reluttant in using microsoft windows, since i start this "Arte" i used only INDI but the camera is really old and i have had problems to let it work under Linux due the obsolete QHY drivers. So i moved to N.I.N.A. software.

I honestly have to admit that N.I.N.A is a really powerful toy, there is a lot of useful tools but i'm new in using it and i need a little bit of time to better understand.

Anyway i did a fast and bad polar align and tried to take some frames on M57 that in this time is near to zenith.

Result is very interesting, this is my really first time with a dedicated cooled OSC camera. Thermic noise is an old remembrance and this help me a lot in processing.

Off course the work flow is different but the difference with DSLR image taken last year is really evident. Reds finally comes out!

This old camera has a lot of potential, with an APS-C sensor i could use a reducer and vignetting is under control.I can say that using 2x drizzle can improve a lot the final result.

I'm waiting for a clear sky... Nebulae season is coming and now i have the right gear to do some decent works.

Some negative notes:

The there is no way to control cooler temperature and it always work at -40° below ambient temp. Next step is to add a temperature sensor for improve dark frames taking library and try to do a remote TEC controller with Arduino (there is a lot of projects on the web for this).

There is some vertical bright lines but appling dithering and calibration files that lines disappear.

All suggestions and critics are really welcome astro friends!

Details:

Gain: 1

Offset: 127

Lights: 10x300" drizzled 2x

Daks: 10

Flats:20

Biases: 20