Daytime lunar imaging with the QHY462C camera

It was a beautiful sunny day. While sitting out on the patio having a coffee I looked up and noticed the waning crescent Moon floating in the blue sky. It was a wonderful sight.

I really love astronomy and it has kindled something inside me since I was child looking at the Moon. This desire to explore the cosmos and our own solar system never grows old.

I got the urge to power up the telescope equipment to have a look at the Moon during the day. I used the QHY462C planetary camera and my William Optics Zenithstar 71mm refractor. This setup piggybacks on top of my Esprit 100 triplet refractor. The QHY462C is a multi-purpose camera so I also use it for auto guiding.

The QHY462C is the shortened name for this camera which is also known as the QHY5III462. It uses a back-illuminated 2.1MP Sony 6th generation sensor, 2.9 microns, 1920×1080 and can record at up to 135fps. This camera even does both colour and mono imaging!

The filter matrix in the sensor uses organic dye filters. These filters are very efficient at visible wavelengths but become completely transparent in the NIR. For this reason, good RGB color balance requires an external UV/IR filter that blocks NIR wavelengths. Many other colour cameras build the UV/IR filter into the camera or optical window for colour imaging. However, in order to fully exploit the capabilities of the 462C sensor, this camera’s optical window is AR (anti-reflection) coated only with no UV or IR blocking. So the QHY462C camera includes two 1.25″ screw-in filters, a UV/IR cut filter to isolate the visible wavelengths for normal RGB imaging and an IR850 filter that will cut the visible wavelengths but pass wavelengths above 850nm.

Watch my Youtube video below for more on the equipment used and images of the Moon I took during the day! Don’t forget to subscribe to my Youtube channel if you haven’t already!