Imaging with a low end T7C camera (a ZWO 120 knockoff)

Greetings fellow astronomers.  I am reviewing my first planetary camera I bought on a budget a year ago the T7C astro planetary camera.  I used my 102mm Mak for planetary imaging and my small Orion 80mm goscope for some deep sky imaging!  I have also updated this review with some recent images i took off Saturn and Jupiter with this camera in August of 2023 to show its capabiltity of this entry level budget planetary camera even with basic equipment and small telescopes. Of course I live in a bortle 7/8 city which limits the overall quality of the images and does not reflect to the cameras limits.. There is some good and not so good with this basic old camera.  The great part of this camera with the arc 130 sensor is the camera capture frame rate is very quick topping out in the lowest ROI modes at around 175 fps while planetary imaging even through it is usb2.  The high frame rate definitely definitely helps cut through atmospheric distortion and fast planetary rotation improving the chances of capturing good steady frames in non optimal conditions.  The bad part of this camera is that this old sensor - the ARC130CS sensor is also used in the ZWO ASI 120 camera and is a very noisy sensor with a fair bit of read and quantum noise.  The good news is this noise produced is a fixed noise pattern and can be virtually taken out and eliminated using dark frame subtraction and as a result the images look very good even with these noisy frame captures.

So in this blog I am going to show some cool images of Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (newer captures in late summer of 2023), some older Uranus and Neptune shoots and some nice DSO images captured with it (taken during winter of 2023 and last fall of 2022).  The planetary images were captured with the 102mak capturing around 1000 frames (stacked at 50 percent). The DSO example images taken from this planetary camera was using short durations (15 12 and 24 second captures each around 6 min to 12 min total integration time at 50 percent stack) with relatively high camera gain (70 percent gain). 

I. The planets captured with the T7C Astro Planetary camera (in bortle 8 sky):

The images of Venus with this camera were taken in different phases from Feb 2023 to June 2023 (later phase pictures taken with SV305C in another article). The images of Mars were taken in early 2023 during the opposition during decent seeing conditions with fairly high light pollution. The images of Jupiter and Saturn shown below were captured  in ok seeing conditions but not great seeing conditions here in western Canada but with some smoke haze still in the air in August 2023.  Uranus and Neptune taken in fall and winter of 2022 and 2023.  Both were imaged relatively low to the horizon.  I have included some interesting processing example images as well that show how these images were edited.

1. Scope Setup used for planetary: Celestron 102mm Mak (FL 1250mm) on Celestron Astrofi goto mount

2. Venus

3. Mars

4. Jupiter

 5. Saturn:

6. Uranus

7. Neptune

What do you think? You be the judge of some of the samples of Jupiter and Saturn shown from this old camera? Remember these images were captured low on the horizon and under average conditions with lots of light pollution. 

II. DSO Imaging with the T7C Astro Planetary Camera:

1. Scope Setup used for Deep Sky imaging: Orion 80mm Goscope (FL 350mm) on Celestron Astrofi goto mount

2. DSO targets captured in high gain (at 70 percent gain 24 second shots based on 15 shoots each 50 percent stacked):

For all planetary and DSO imaging images above Astrosurface was used to stack the captured raw 16 bit image targets (stacking with rotation option) and 8 bit RAW 8 was used for planetary video used for planetary stacking and processing.  Siril was used to do the DSO color calibration, background extraction (getting rid of light pollution and gradients caused by it, etc) and process all the DSO final images you see above.  Registax was used for planetary sharpening and color balancing as viewed above.  I also used Astra image and Wavesharp to enhance and enlarge some of the final planetary images you see above from the smaller stacked ones seen.

III. Conclusions

So this a low end entry level planetary camera which is a clone of the ZWO ASI120 (still being sold by ZWO but now USB3 a faster version).  This is a noisy camera which is not only capable of planetary imaging at a pretty decent framerate but can also do some basic DSO imaging.  Of course to get rid of the noise from this camera you need to use dark frames which works very well since the camera produces a fixed noise pattern.  Of course the longer the integration (more and more shoots) the more detail you will get in your DSO images even from this simple planetary camera.  This is also true for planetary imaging the more frames captured and stacked the more planetary detail you will get from the planets especially from a basic camera like this one. I think the images are pretty good considering the small number of shoots taken and the sky conditions here in Canada lately.  You decide.

Clear skies to you all!