Player One Mars-C (IMX462)USB3.0 Color Camera

The Mars-C is a planetary camera developed by Player One Astronomy, which adopts the Sony IMX462 1/2.8” format sensor. The 2.9um pixel size accommodates a well depth of 12ke with a total of 2.1MP  (the resolution is 1944*1096), and the diagonal is 6.46 mm.

The naming of Player One Astronomy cameras is unique. For example, we name the planetary cameras after planets (They are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, Earth is not included). The size of each planet to a certain extent represents the size of camera sensors. We will name Saturn with a 1-inch sensor camera, and for Mars, we will name it with a ½.8 inch sensor camera. All names will be engraved on the housing of the cameras.

Planetary camera Mars-C Highlights

Mars-C has super high sensitivity and ultra-low readout noise. All of these features provide users with excellent performance for planetary imaging, like Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,  as well as solar and lunar imaging.

The fun thing is, with the strong ability in capturing infrared lights and the super-high sensitivity, the Mars-C camera can be used as a monochrome camera with an IR850 filter or CH4 filter to capture infrared lights.

Connecting the Mars-C camera to a telescope with a 1.25″ T-Mount, or adding a Barlow lens between the camera and a telescope to extend the focal length for more details.

With a CS lens attached to the Mars-C camera, it can be used as an all-day camera or meteor monitoring camera.

Cutting-edge Design

The planetary cameras developed by Player One Astronomy use a scientific and technological regular hexagon to construct the main body line, supplemented by round chamfers to achieve both rigidity and flexibility. The positive red, which is like a summer fire, is matched with the low-key and steady black, and the super-fine frosting process on the entire surface makes the camera look luxurious and cool, highlighting the style of high-end players, can’t take my eyes off ; D

2nd Gen – Sensor Tilt Plate

The built-in high-density sponge shading pad can block the light from the side slits without any side leakage.

256M DDR3 Cache

Player One Astronomy cameras are the first ones who adopt the DDR3 cache in all planetary cameras in the world! It helps stabilize and secure data transmission, effectively avoids frame dropping, and greatly reduces read noise.

With the DDR3 cache, the Mars-C camera does not have high demands on computing needs any longer, it will still have excellent performance even if it is connected to a USB 2.0 port.

DPS technology

The planetary cameras from Player One Astronomy have DPS (Dead Pixel Suppression) technology. The DPS is analyze many dark frames to find those fixed abnormal pixels and record the bad pixel map in camera memory. While imaging, the position 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 ensure the safety of your camera and other equipment through overvoltage and overcurrent protection mechanisms.

Data Port

When the camera is connected to the USB3.0 interface and a full-resolution preview is used, it can reach 136 FPS in RAW8 mode (10bit ADC), and the frame rate in RAW16 mode (12bit ADC) is 64 frames per second. 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. It is recommended that you use a high-quality solid-state drive to record data to give full play to the performance of the camera.

Readout Noise

Regarding readout noise, we solemnly 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, provide a very simple way to test readout noise.

We wrote a tutorial on our website: https://player-one-astronomy.com/service/manuals/

After many rigorous readout noise tests, the Mars-C camera can reach a low readout noise of 0.73e at a gain of 350 and around 0.7e at a gain of 400.

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

HCG  Mode

The Mars-C camera has a unique HCG mode, which will automatically turn on when the camera gain setting is ≥80. The HCG mode can greatly reduce the readout noise and retain the same high dynamic range as the low gain.

QE Curve

The QE curve of the Mars-C camera is unique. The sensitivity reaches its peak at 800-850nm, and the RGB is gathered together, which has very strong infrared sensitivity.