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The CFW9 is essentially the same size and shape as the CFW8A, and will match an ST-series camera body when directly bolted to the front. The two CFW's will be difficult to tell apart by simply looking at them, but there may be some slight difference in backfocus. The CFW9 has the same capacity of five 1.25" filters so there is little practical difference in the two except that the CFW9 will plug into the I2C-AUX port on the cameras instead of the AO/CFW/SCOPE port as the CFW8A did. This also means the CFW9 is not compatible with older parallel versions of the ST series cameras, it will only work with ST cameras that have USB electronics.
SBIG pioneered tricolor imaging for amateurs by developing hardware and software to register and color balance Red, Green, and Blue images that display spectral emission of deep space objects. When interference filters are carefully selected to match the spectral regions of ionized gases the images taken through the filters can be summed together to represent the distribution of these gases. Tricolor images are taken through the CFW-8A Color Filter Wheel and processed with CCDOPS, CCDSoftV5, or third party software. The primary color images are taken through Red, Green and Blue filters. After the images are taken they are processed with the software to co-align the Red, Green and Blue images. The co-aligned image is then color balanced on the computer monitor to become a tricolor RGB image, which can then be saved to disk. A similar process is used to make LRGB images except that a greyscale luminance image is added for detail. CCDOPS software also allows the user to perform image processing functions such as smoothing and sharpening as well as saving images in TIFF format. The raw images can also be saved in a variety of formats for export to any of the many commercially available software programs for color image processing such as Maxim DL and Photoshop.
The CFW9 system is designed to be "direct connected" to any ST-7/8/9/10/2000 imaging camera for a thinner, more rigid mounting. On the front end a variety of optional T-Thread accessories are available including 1.25 inch and 2 inch diameter nose pieces as well as a "Visual Back Adaptor" for direct connection to SCTs. An optional accessory is the AO adapter plate which makes it possible to firmly connect the camera, filter wheel and AO-7 without using a screw-in t-thread adapter.
The CFW9 utilizes a closed loop stepper motor system with positional accuracy of ±0.01 inches. It holds up to five standard 1.25" diameter thread-in filters. It is available with Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) interference filter sets and a clear filter (focusing). These filters are mounted in standard size cells that normally fit into 1.25" eyepiece barrels. The CFW9 adds back focus of approximately 1 inch.
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