54 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2022
A new type of camera may signal
the future of astroimaging.
BY TONY HALLAS
The CMOS
revolution
is here
HERE WAS A TIME,
possibly before some of you
reading this were born, when
astroimaging was an ordeal.
Imagine a world with manual
guiding. You’d spend hours
staring at a star centered in an
illuminated reticle until your eye
teared up or you passed out into
the eyepiece from fatigue.
The equipment was alsoheavy and a pain to transport. If you
were using a Newtonian ref lector, you
would be standing on a ladder for hours
watching the guide star. Often, after
about 30 minutes, the eyepiece’s position
would place you uncomfortably between
the rungs of the ladder and you would be
stuck in this death crouch, clinging to
the ladder in the freezing cold, trying to
keep the star centered on the crosshairs.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, you alsohad no idea — until you developed the
film — if you were making a mistake.
More than half the results would show
trailed stars or that everything was out
of focus. Such was astroimaging when I
started about 35 years ago. The average
“lifespan” of an imager back then was
three to five years. After that, most peo-
ple couldn’t take it anymore.
In the coming years, the Santa