Player One Saturn-C SQR Colour Camera

The Player One Saturn-C SQR is an uncooled colour astronomy camera built around Sony’s square 1″ IMX533 sensor. It is the same sensor as the cooled Ares-C Pro, in a light 160 g body.

It suits live stacking of galaxies and nebulae, lucky imaging of small deep-sky targets, and mosaics of the Moon and the Sun. On a 600 mm refractor it samples at 1.29″ per pixel over a field of about 65 × 65 arcminutes.

Each 3.76 µm pixel holds up to 73,000 electrons, and dark frames show no amp glow. A low-noise mode gives more dynamic range for deep-sky work, and a normal mode gives higher frame rates, up to 43 frames per second at full resolution.

The body has a passive heatsink. Our Player One Active Cooling System fits if you want to keep it close to air temperature: Player One measures about 7 °C above ambient with it fitted.

The window is AR-coated, not IR-cut, so add a UV/IR-cut or dual-band filter for colour imaging. The sensor tilt plate corrects tilt, and a 256 MB buffer stops dropped frames on slower laptops.