The Ring Nebula with Digital Binning

The new digital binning feature in the MallincamSky software adds significant new functionality to all the DS series cameras. Binning allows you to combine individual pixels into groups, so that they function as if they were larger, more sensitive pixels. Binning can decrease both noise and integration time, but at the cost of resolution. The most impressive part of this feature is that it enables binning on CMOS-based cameras. The DS16C is 16-megapixel camera, so even with 2x2 binning, it still has very high resolution.

Here is an image of the Ring Nebula taken with the f/4 newt and binned DS16C. I set a low gain (5) and the image is a stack of 5 x 10-second integrations with a mild histogram stretch. Noise is quite low--a little bit of amp glow is visible at the top and bottom edges of the image, but overall, it is very decent. The zoomed crop (the DS16C has a huge FOV with the newt) shows that resolution is not terribly badly affected by the binning process.

The Astrometry.net analysis of this image is interesting:

IC 1296 is just visible. It is a faint, face-on barred spiral of Mag 15.5--about the same magnitude as the central star of the ring. If you zoom the image, you can just see the spiral structure of the galaxy.