The ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera offers high-end features in an affordable package. We check out how it performs under the night sky.
The ASI533MC Pro camera is aimed at those looking to purchase a dedicated multi-purpose camera for astrophotography. Once upon a time, cameras such as this would have set you back a tidy four-figure sum, but with the advent of affordable technology from Chinese manufacturers such as ZWO the playing field has completely changed. Today cameras once costing a small fortune are within reach of a much wider range of consumers.
The camera connects to a PC via the supplied USB3 cable, and drivers to run the camera can be downloaded from the ZWO website. We had no trouble at all having the camera up and running within a few minutes.In the box along with the camera itself comes a variety of accessories. The camera itself comes in a small, padded zip bag. Also included are a multitude of different adapters giving you options on how to connect it to your telescope or attach other accessories.
The camera itself is powered directly from the USB connection. A separate power supply is only needed if you wish to run the camera cooling system . Once connected to your PC you’ll see a live preview on screen. On the PC we tested the camera on, it easily achieved the quoted 20fps rate at full-frame running with no problems at all.
With Jupiter, since much of the field was not required, we used the region of interest feature to crop down the captured area. This allows the camera to run at very high frame rates desirable for imaging the planets. Imaging the planets with color cameras such as this is always good fun as you can often see many details and colors on their disks. One advantage of this particular camera is the larger 3.76um pixel size. This matches longer focal length telescopes like the Schmidt Cassegrains well.
Next came some testing for Deep Sky imaging. For this I decided to wait for a decent clear and moonless night. For the initial tests I decided to try imaging with the camera without using the cooling system to see just how well it would perform ‘out of the box’ so to speak. I then decided to fire up the camera cooling system and try a few shots using this. The cooling system is only required if you are going to use the camera for long single exposures In this instance it does make a notable difference to reducing noise across the image.
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