Greetings fellow astronomers. I recently purchased the new Player one Neptune 664C camera as a Christmas gift in early December 2024 and my family chipped in. I purchased it in hopes to use it for astrophotography for deep sky imaging and of course for Planetary imaging. I was quite impressed with the previous Svbony SV305C planetary camera I purchased in the summer time of 2023 when it was first released. The Svbony SV305C planetary camera from Svbony produces very low noise and very clean images of both planets and deep sky targets I was very impressed so it seems buying the Player one Neptune with the 664C was a safe bet. Please see my reviews on this planetary camera for more information on the Svbony SV305C camera. Why did I buy the Player one Neptune 664C camera when I already purchased the Svbony SV305C? Well the new Player one Neptune 664C has a sensor twice the area or size of the Sony IMX662 sensor in the Svbony SV305C and I wanted a larger capture area for deep sky imaging. This camera was also on sale by Ontario telescope at a very good price. So I went for it. Basically the sensors in both of these cameras are almost identical except for the sensor size. The Sony IMX662 is a 1/3 sensor in the SV305C and the Sony IMX664 sensor in the Neptune 664C is a 1/2 inch sensor otherwise their sensor characteristics are identical. The one other main difference is the Player one Neptune 664C is a USB3 camera and the Svbony SV305C camera is a USB2. This means the frame rate is much faster on the Neptune 664C which should produce better planetary captures. So of course in this review the question is how well does the Neptune 664C work for imaging planets? Does the Neptune 664C do a decent job of deep sky imaging?....please read on.
Planetary Imaging with the Player one Neptune 664C camera
So all these images shown below were all captured in not great seeing conditions at all here in western Canada due to hazy winter skies with lots of ice crystallization in the upper atmosphere. When I first hooked up and tested this camera on Jupiter I noticed a few really bad bright faulty pixels and had to contact Player one support to get this addressed. They connected to my computer and camera remotely and ran a remote DPS mapping program and fixed all the bad and hot pixels on my Player one camera. The Player one support was actually great and they were very prompt and very helpful. Not sure why this camera had these bad pixels in the first place and this camera should have been checked and adjusted properly before it even left the factory so was a bit unsettled by this especially just purchasing it. Once thing I am still noticing with it that I do not notice near as much on my Svbony SV305C planetary camera is there seems to be a bit of pronounced blue noise in my captures. I am trying to sort this out. To be fair this could be caused by bad atmospheric conditions here and I have only managed to take out this new camera a few times.
For processing I used AstroSurface for the planetary stacking and image processing. Capture frames for planetary on Jupiter are around 2500 frames each using RAW 8 50% stacked. Jupiter is also getting farther away from Earth and therefore getting harder to capture great images of it. For the planet Uranus I captured about 50 to 70 RAW 16 frames 50% percent stacked using 800ms exposures at various the gain levels. Below you can see the Neptune 664C camera in action and some the first initial first light planetary captures I have managed to get with the Neptune 664 Camera:
Scope Setup used
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| The Neptune 664C Camera |
Lunar closeup of the Moon
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| The Moon |
Jupiter
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Enlarged Jupiter with Svbony 2X achromatic barlow attached
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| Original sized - Jupiter with 2X Acromatic barlow |
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| Another capture of Jupiter |
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| Another capture of Jupiter |
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| Jupiter and IO close by |
Uranus
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| Uranus Original size |
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| Uranus Enlarged |
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| Uranus overexposed and one of its dim moons close by the planet |
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| Another capture of Uranus with one of its dim moons close by |
What do you think? You be the judge of some of the initial captures with this camera shown? Looks decent to me considering the conditions they were taken in and I am sure this new camera will even produce much better images with better color and detail under better seeing conditions.
Deep Sky Imaging with the Neptune 664C camera
So how well does the Neptune 664C planetary camera fare with deep sky imaging? I only managed to get out once since I got this camera due to sky conditions and cold weather here in Canada. I performed this deep sky imaging with my wide field telescope the Orion goscope (350mm FL) to get the largest field of view possible from this new camera especially with its larger 1/2 inch sensor than my SV305C with its 1/3 inch sensor. Using this little scope also works very well on my Celestron goto mount and provides a fairly acccurate goto and tracking on small DSO targets. This scope due to its focal ratio also captures a decent amount of light in short exposures as I am not using a equatorial mount for much longer exposures. This is to avoid star rotation due to using a Alt-z mount setup I use keeping exposures below 30 seconds or less.
The Player one Neptune 664C camera is suitable for imaging many planetary nebula such as M1 Crab Nebula, M27 Dumbbell Nebula, M42 Orion Nebula, M57 Ring Nebula etc. Galaxys such as Bodes Galaxy, Cigar galaxy, Black eye galaxy, M51 and M101 etc fit also fit nicely in its field of view. Based on availablity of what was in the time of imaging here are a couple of intial deep sky image examples tested and captured with the Neptune 664C camera:
M42 - The Great Orion Nebula
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| M42 The Great Orion Nebula captured full image |
The Mini Dumbell Nebula
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The Mini Dumbell Nebula captured full image
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The Horsehead Nebula |
The Horsehead Nebula captured full image
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No dark frames were used or taken after my brief deep sky session above. The reason I wanted to see how well the low noise floor on the camera worked. The deep sky captures were all based on average of 10 images each around 20 seconds each. AstroSurface was used to stack the captured raw 16 bit captures using DSO with rotation. Siril was used to do the color DSO calibration, background extraction (getting rid of light pollution and gradients caused by it etc) and to process the final images as seen above..
Final Results
So how well did the Player one Neptune 664C camera do on capturing both planetary and deep sky images? Well you decide for yourself! The captures I took above were in Western Canada in cold hazy light polluted skies here at the time. I live in a Bortle 7 city and during Christmas is it of course much worse due to Christmas lights all on and blinking away and much brighter skies as a result. You decide for yourself. I will definitely be doing much more testing and imaging of both planetary and deep sky in the future in a future blog review when weather conditions improve.
Conclusion
In my opinion, I think this camera is pretty good but was a bit disappointment to be honest with the initial defects I had with this camera considering Player one cameras are considered premuim products and are somewhat pricey compared to other brands like Svbony for example. With my Svbony camera in the summer I had no issues with bad pixels,etc so not sure if I just got a lemon or not or had bad luck. Maybe this is just a one off and hopefully not a quality control issue with Player one cameras now. I am pretty sure many astronomers with better equipment than mine are getting much better results especially planetary out of this Neptune 66C just check out the player one group on Facebook
Player one Astronomy for examples of what is coming out this new camera. I am very surprised there are few to no real reviews of this camera other than advertising and useless unboxing videos on the web of these products actually. I hope you enjoyed this brief article on the new Player one Neptune 664C camera and some of it's planetary and deep sky imaging capability.
I will be performing much more testing on this camera when better weather permits. I also want to write a dedicated review comparing this camera to my Svbony SV305C camera. So keep your eye on my blog for more updates on the Neptune 664C camera.
Clear skies to you all!
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