Sky and Telescope - October 2016 - 60

S&T Test Report

Left: The Inﬁnity's 2/3-inch format Sony ICX825 EXview HAD CCD II detector boasts high quantum eﬃciency, meaning you'll record
faint objects with fairly short exposures. Right: Three ports on the bottom of the Inﬁnity are a B-type USB 2.0, an RJ-12 port that
allows the camera to be used as an autoguider, and a DC power input. The red LED is activated only when the camera is connected to
your telescope mount.

drivers and software needed to operate the camera, as well
as a PDF manual. Currently, the Inﬁnity's software is only
available for PCs running Windows Vista, 7, 8, or 10.
I was impressed with the build quality of the Inﬁnity,
but was less impressed with its software installer and
quick-start guide. Both are generic and don't address the
Inﬁnity speciﬁcally; they're applicable to all Atik cameras. Likewise, the DVD contains software for the entire
range of Atik products. Inserting it yielded an install
window with a long list of programs and utilities that
could be installed. It was obvious I needed to load "Inﬁnity," but did I also need ASCOM drivers? What were the
"plug-ins" the app was oﬀering to install?
The quick-start guide helped some by cautioning me
to be sure "drivers" (not ASCOM drivers) was checked
in the window. Otherwise, it instructed me to select
any optional software I need. But what did I need? With
the help of the Atik website, I ﬁnally ﬁgured out I only

Included with the Inﬁnity is an install disk with the camera
drivers and software necessary to operate the camera. It also
includes many other drivers and plug-ins for third-party software, as well as drivers for many other Atik products.

October 2016 sky & telescope

needed to install the Inﬁnity application in addition to
the camera drivers.
Once I got past the installation, I thought I'd have a
look at the Inﬁnity program indoors. But it wasn't clear
how I was supposed to do that, since the installer didn't
place an icon for the program on my desktop. A little
digging around on the hard drive turned up a directory
named "ArtemisCCD," which I recalled from the quickstart guide. Inside that directory was a sub-directory
called "Inﬁnity," and in it was the software application of
the same name.
When I launched the program, I became a lot happier.
The software doesn't have an overwhelming number of
features, but that's in keeping with the nature of video
astronomy as a simpler way to take images. There are no
menus to navigate to set up the camera; just connect the
power, plug in the USB cable, and run the program.
From there it's a matter of learning a few buttons,
controls, and indicators. Exposures are limited to a
maximum of 120 seconds, but for the dimmest objects,
you can select a binning mode, a process combining the
sensor's pixels into groups of 2×2, 4×4, or 8×8. The result
is considerably more sensitivity but at the expense of resolution. Also, due to the way the Inﬁnity produces color
images, binned exposures appear in black and white.
One of the software's most important features
is "Image Stacking." When stacking is enabled, the
program automatically aligns and combines incoming
images into a single, smoother-looking frame. While
stacking doesn't add details not present in the individual
sub-frames, it makes everything clearer by reducing the
noise in the image, which made a big diﬀerence in what
I was able to achieve with the Inﬁnity.
The remaining controls that will get the most use
concern the histogram at the bottom of the screen. The
program also permits users to select automatic histogram settings - high, medium, low - to set image
brightness and contrast, but manual adjustment of the

Sky and Telescope - October 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - October 2016