Here’s a new price point for a large, APS-sized, cooled, one-shot color, astronomical CCD camera – the QHY8. It costs about $1,500 from CCD Labs where it’s called the Q453.
It uses a low-noise Sony color CCD sensor, the same one apparently used in the Nikon D50 DSLR camera. It’s not as cheap as a Nikon D50, but it is cooled and has a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter. This gives you an APS-sized, 6 megapixel sensor with fairly large 7.8 micron pixels at a very reasonable price.
Of course, unlike a DSLR, you still need to hook it up to a computer to run it.
