QHYCCD’s new 60-megapixel camera

THERE’S A LOT TO TALK ABOUT with the new QHY600M camera from QHYCCD, so let’s jump right in. And the first thing there’s a lot of is pixels — 62,393,796 of them, according to the spec sheet for Sony’s IMX455 back-side illuminated, full-frame, CMOS sensor, with slightly more than 61 million of them active imaging pixels. To put that into a bit of personal perspective, I got my start in digital astrophotography about 30 years ago with several cameras built around the TC211 CCD sensor made by Texas Instruments. It was small but still boasted nearly 32,000 pixels. Just one square millimetre of the QHY600M’s chip contains more than twice that many pixels.

All those pixels translate into a chip capable of extraordinary image resolution. In theory, the QHY600M can resolve about 133 line pairs per millimetre. If we spin the clock back a few decades, that kind of resolution would typically outperform Kodak’s Technical Pan film, the last great heartthrob for amateurs in the days of emulsion-based astrophotography. The QHY600M is the kind of camera many amateurs have long wished for — the resolution of fine-grain film coupled with the sensitivity of modern digital detectors. But, as the saying goes, sometimes we should