Artemis Art 4021 CCD Cameras - Large 23mm Diagonal Sensor

The Artemis 4021 CCD camera is a new mid-size camera with a high performance sensor for astro-imaging. They are the logical step between the cheaper ATiK cameras and the huge Artemis 11002 camera.

CCD Sensor
The Kodak KAI4021 sensor was chosen for the new camera. Kodak has a great reputation for providing sensors for high end astronomy applications. The KAI4021 is a 4 million pixel device with a diagonal of about 23mm! It has an electronic shutter which, like the Sony ICX285, makes it very easy to use both for imaging faint deep sky objects or large scale images of a bright moon.

The Art4021 is designed to be simple to use. Jon Groves excellent Capture program is included as are plug-ins for Astro Art 2 and Maxim DL. The camera only has two sockets, one for power (12V) and the other a USB2 connection.

Easy to Use
To make a camera appear simple it needs to have brains! The camera uses a standard Artemis operating system on a PIC microcontroller running at 32Mhz. This looks after most of the house keeping functions of the camera including temperature control of the sensor. The analogue to digital converter is made by Texas Instruments and can convert 2 million samples per second at 16 bit resolution. A reprogrammable Xlinix logic device handles the high speed signal generation as well as data processing. Both the Xilinx chip and the PIC are firmware updateable over the USB link so any firmware upgrades can be installed without requiring the camera to be returned. Finally a Cypress USB 2 controller is used to interface the camera with a computer.