ZWO ASI2600MC Duo APS-C Cooled Color Astronomy Camera with Built-In Guide Sensor

ASI2600MC Duo Overview

The ZWO ASI2600MC Duo is a revolutionary astrophotography color camera with a guide sensor built in for easy autoguiding! Featuring the same main camera sensor as the ultra-popular ASI2600MC Pro, this camera has a guide camera sensor built in just above the main camera sensor. This gives you the added benefit of not needing a separate guide scope or off-axis guider.

ASI2600MC Duo Main Camera

The main camera features the famed IMX571 color sensor, which is one of the most used sensors in astrophotography. With a 26-megapixel resolution of 6248x4176, this camera excels at capturing deep sky objects in their full glory and ready for printing.

A 16-bit ADC lends to a high dynamic range of 14 stops, meaning the camera can capture detail in dark shadows and bright highlights. The 3.76µm pixels are sized very well for pixel scale on a wide variety of astrophotography telescopes, ensuring you won't be undersampled or oversampled.

With a cooling fan capable of reaching -35º C below ambient temperature and a read noise as low as 0.9e, the ASI2600MC Duo keeps noise in your images very low compared to most other color cameras on the market.

An overall quantum efficiency of 80% translates to impressive light-gathering ability, and a full well capacity of 73ke (up from 50ke on the ASI2600MC Pro) means stars won't become oversaturated and lose detail. Amp glow is a thing of the past with this camera, and dark frames will have zero amp glow.

The sensor itself measures 28.3mm across the diagonal, which is APS-C size.

ASI2600MC Duo Guide Camera

Unlike other astrophotography cameras including ZWO's Pro line, the ASI2600MC Duo has a special trick up its sleeve: a built in guide camera sensor situated just above the main camera sensor. Like the main camera, the guide camera can pick up guide stars from your telescope, eliminating the need for a guide scope. If you're upgrading from a guide scope, your guiding results will drastically improve because you can guide at your telescope's full focal length and not the guide scope.

The ASI2600MC Duo also eliminates the need for an off-axis guider, which uses a pickup prism to pick off light. By eliminating an off-axis guider, you then have more back focus available for additional accessories like a camera rotator, which ZWO has previously teased as a future product. Technically, the ASI2600MC Duo utilizes an on-axis guider system.

When the ASI2600MC Duo was first announced, many astrophotographers questioned the ability of the guide camera to pick up guide stars. This is because the guide sensor sits behind any filters. Since some filters like dual band filters drastically reduce the amount of incoming light, it was unclear whether the guide camera could detect stars to guide from. This has been thoroughly tested and the results are clear: the guide camera sensor has no issue with picking up guide stars.

The guide camera sensor is the same found in the ASI220MM Mini, which is a highly-sensitive guide camera. The sensor is 7.7 x 4.3mm and has a resolution of 1920x1080. Autoguiding software uses what is known as the centroid of a star to accurately guide. This means that round stars are not required for good guiding. Even though stars may appear elongated on telescopes with APS-C sized image circles, users report that guiding still works extremely well on the ASI2600MC Duo.