[This is my first ever CN post, so please forgive any etiquette violations.]
I just wanted to announce that I have written an ASCOM compatible driver for the Sigma fp L, currently in beta testing. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first ASCOM driver for this camera series. It extends ASCOM.DSLR to support Sigma fp L (and fp potentially), drawing on the sigma_ptpy library. Thus far, I have been testing it successfully with NINA, taking hundreds of shots per night without issue. But any astrophotography software that is able to use ASCOM.DSLR should also work.
The camera would seem to be well suited for astrophotography, having a 61Mp sensor (Sony IMX455) while being small & light. It is also significantly cheaper than an equivalent ASI6200MC (although it lacks sensor cooling) – $2.5k vs $3.8k. As noted elsewhere on CN, the Sigma fp L has very impressive noise performance. For example, here is a single unprocessed 300s frame @ ISO 400 of M101 under Bortle 5.5 skies that I took with a Tak FC100-DZ: https://astrob.in/4w2mpi/0/.
Some more details:
- The driver permits usual DSLR shutter speed ranges [30sec – 1/4000sec], as well as a 300sec shutter duration (this required some hacking since the Sigma SDK does not support Bulb exposures).
- Full ISO range of the Sigma fp L supported.
- A single USB-C cable suffices to provide power and data connection to the camera.
- Ahead of the ASCOM driver installation, to enable USB control of the camera, the Zadig USB installer package must be used to replace the default USB driver that handles the camera with libusb-win32.
- By default, the driver saves a .DNG raw file to disk, as well as passing a pure raw array to NINA (or whatever software you are using).
- The Sigma fp L firmware appears to be implementing some form of long exposure noise reduction that I have not figured out a way to disable (although I have reached out to Sigma Japan about this).
If folks are interested, please message me and I’d be happy to share the driver. Once I am more confident in the code, I’ll send a pull request to the ASCOM.DSLR authors.
Sincerely, Rob Fergus