Player One Xena-M (IMX249) USB3.0 Mono Camera

Player One Astronomy guiding camera series, AKA Dwarf Planet Series, is designed for guiding and imaging—this series includes 3 sub-series, Ceres, Sedna, and Xena.

Product Description

Xena-M is a guiding camera developed by Player One Astronomy, which adopts the Sony IMX249 1/1.2” format sensor. The 5.86um pixel size accommodates a good depth of 32ke with a total of 2.3MP  (the resolution is 1936*1216), and the diagonal is 13.3mm.

This IMX249 sensor has the same performance as the IMX174 sensor, transmit speed of IMX249 is 48fps.

Highlights

Dwarf planet series integrated USB3.0 data port(500Mb/s), which can provide over 10 times faster than USB2.0 device(60Mb/s). Whatever you want to do guiding or imaging, this camera series can handle it very well.

Dwarf planet camera diameter is 1.25″, it can slide in a 1.25″ adapter of guiding scope, making the whole setup shorter.

With a 5-100MM CS lens attached to the camera, it can also be used as a guide or finder.

Features:

The naming of Player One guiding cameras is interesting. The guiding camera is smaller than the planetary camera, so we chose dwarf planets to name it.

The size of each dwarf planet to a certain extent represents the size of camera sensors. We will name Ceres with a 1/3″ sensor camera, and for Xena, we will name it with a 1/1.2 inch sensor camera. All names will be engraved on the housing of the cameras.

Drivers and software download: http://player-one-astronomy.com/service/software/

Manuals download: http://player-one-astronomy.com/service/manuals/

Cutting-edge Design

The guiding cameras developed by Player One Astronomy use a regular hexagon to construct the main body line.

Nova Boosting technology

Nova Boosting technology from Player One Astronomy uses hardware technology to overclock the frequency of the sensor, and then increase the FPS of the sensor. The official speed of the IMX249 sensor on the Sony website is 30FPS, some cameras with IMX249 cameras only have 22 FPS. But with Nova Boosting technology, our Xena-M (IMX249) camera can reach 48FPS. NB technology made Xena-M fast enough for solar, lunar, and planetary imaging. This technology is also used on our other cameras.

DPS technology

The guiding cameras from Player One Astronomy have DPS (Dead Pixel Suppression) technology. The DPS analyzes many dark frames to find out those fixed abnormal pixels and records the map in camera memory. In imaging, in each exposure frame, those positions of dead pixels will be given a median value according to the active pixels around that abnormal pixel.

Overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanism

Player One cameras produced by the number one player ensure the safety of your camera and other equipment through overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanisms.

Data Port

When the camera is connected to the USB 3.0 interface and a full-resolution preview is used, it can reach 48 FPS in RAW8 mode (10bit ADC). When recording images, since the actual writing speed will be affected by the writing speed of the hard disk itself, when the hard disk writing speed is slow, the recording may not reach the theoretical speed. You should use a high-quality solid-state drive to record data to give full play to the camera's performance.

Use the ST4 guide cable to connect the camera and the AUTO GUIDE port of the equatorial mount to do the guiding.

Performance

Readout Noise

Regarding readout noise, we promise that all values are obtained from actual tests.  And for users, you could use Sharpcap 4 for testing. SC4 has a function called Sensor Analysis, which provides an effortless way to test readout noise.

Player One wrote a tutorial on their website: https://player-one-astronomy.com/service/manuals/

After many rigorous readout noise tests, the Xena-M camera can reach a low readout noise of 3.57e at a gain of 350.

If you are interested in readout noise testing, try it yourself, which is very simple.

QE Curve

The Xena-M camera has about 77% QE peak.

Mechanical Drawing

Specifications