Lodestar Live 0.11 or Camera Issues?

[johnpd]

I finally got outside to play with my new Lodestar X2 Mono using Lodestar Live v0.11. I had it mounted in a Mini Borg 50 (250mm F/L @ f/5). I have some questions.

1. The minimum exposure setting appears to be .02s. Is this correct? I could not get an exposure short enough to image the Moon without it being blown out. Even playing with the sliders did not help much.

2. I was experiencing the camera being dropped by the computer (Toshiba Win7 64-bit laptop) a number of times. I could not enable the Lodestar Live Run button when this occurred (which is understandable). I did not notice any indicator in Lodestar Live that said the camera was not connected except that the only button that could be enabled was "Stop". To correct the problem I had to to unplug the camera from the computer then plug it back in and restart Lodestar Live then everything started working again. Has anyone run into this situation before? I don't understand what was causing the disconnect. The camera was connected to a USB 2 port on the computer. I have not experienced any issues using that port before. I could try another port or could the cable be defective? I assume the cable has a standard USB Mini plug on one end and a standard USB regular plug on the other?

3. I tried imaging M42 a little. It was pretty much blown out as well and it was difficult to see much nebulosity. I did not have a chance to try stacking at very short exposures. That may have worked better. I was dodging clouds most of the time. I will have to try it with a little larger scope.

4. In looking at some of the video tutorials for Lodestar Live there was a "gamma" slider on previous versions which seems to be gone from v0.11. Is this correct?

Thanks,

 JohnD

[Martin Meredith]

Hi John

1. Yes, min exposure is 20ms which is still way too long for the moon unless you use filters.

2. There's an icon at the lower left which indicates (face = yes, cross = no) whether the camera is connected. I occasionally have issues with the cable and I blame the connector at the Lodestar camera end.

3. You should be able to obtain decent shots of M42 in say 5s upwards with your scope. If it is blown out then its a matter of reducing the brightness control, I guess, or at least ensuring that the main body of the histogram is centred using the brightness and contrast controls.

4. Yes, gamma is no longer there. instead there are 3 compression modes (linear, arcsinh and sqrt).

Hope this helps

Martin

[johnpd]

Thanks for your response Martin,

1. I was considering the possibility of using the camera for H-a solar viewing, but the Sun can be very bright as well. 20ms probably won't hack it.

2. Your answer to #2 does not leave me with a lot of warm fuzzies especially if the connection drops in the middle of guiding. I saw that icon in the lower left but I did not pay a lot of attention to it. Thanks for pointing it out.

3. I will try it again, probably with a little bigger scope.

4. OK, I played with that a little and noticed some dramatic difference when I tried it.

JohnD

[f15p5]

Hi John.

A few things to try. Update your flash player or go into Flash Player storage and delete License audio files etc.

Reload drivers. If you are getting an image with proper histo signal it's not the camera. I doubt it's the cable. I found that turning off all anti virus software helps on my computer. Also if you have it set for auto updates check the time, might be when you are trying to use camera. Make sure you have enough ram free.

Good luck,

Richard

[Martin Meredith]

2. Your answer to #2 does not leave me with a lot of warm fuzzies especially if the connection drops in the middle of guiding. I saw that icon in the lower left but I did not pay a lot of attention to it. Thanks for pointing it out.

Just to add that I don't get many connection dropouts (fewer than 1 per session, and only then if I've stretched the USB cable too far… so its not a big deal). And since you're not really guiding as such when using LodestarLive getting dropouts isn't an issue. You don't lose more than say 30-60s of data. Of course, if you're using the Lodestar for proper guiding in the AP sense it would be an issue but there seems to be 1000s of APers using it very happily with few problems.

Richard: this sounds like my experience in the past using anything on Windows; all these problems disappeared completely when I started using Macs...   

Martin

[arkosg]

Just to echo Martin, I've been using LL with a Mac as well, and have found no "disconnection" issues at all to this point.  I use the supplied USB cable 

and a USB extender cable in my setup, so there typically isn't much strain on the cabling at all.

Cheers,

- Greg A

[johnpd]

Hi John.

A few things to try. Update your flash player or go into Flash Player storage and delete License audio files etc.

Reload drivers. If you are getting an image with proper histo signal it's not the camera. I doubt it's the cable. I found that turning off all anti virus software helps on my computer. Also if you have it set for auto updates check the time, might be when you are trying to use camera. Make sure you have enough ram free.

Good luck,

Richard

Richard,

  Thanks for your reply. I do have the latest Flash Player and I don't have any License audio files. This computer has 6GB of RAM with not much else running on it so there should be plenty available. After startup, my phyiscal memory usage is about 22%, CPU Usage is normally less than 5% and usually much less than that. I have MS Essentials as my AV on this computer which is not really very resource heavy. I will try turning it off. I always have Windows Updates shut off. I have been using this computer to run a Mallincam video camera with both camera control and A/D conversion of the output through a USB adapter and never had an issue with them. I do get a proper histogram with the Lodestar so I am not sure what might be happening. I can hear when the camera is dropped (I hear the double tone when it happens).

JohnD

[johnpd]

Thanks to Martin and Greg for your replies. I will continue to play with it. I might try connecting the camera to my Win 8 desktop inside to see if I get the same issues. I have a USB extender cable I can use.

JohnD

[f15p5]

Hi John,

Try using other software like Nebulosity or Lodestar X2. If they work fine you know it's not the camera. If they don't, it could be your computer or the camera/software issue. I am using the same as you, a Toshiba win 7 64 bit. Try another USB port also.

Richard

[Paul81]

Hi John,

Hope you are able to sort your USB issues. Another thing to check is if you are getting moisture in the USB connector (camera and laptop) as that can also cause the issues you are seeing.

On a slight positive note, if you get a disconnection, once you have re-connected the camera LL will carry on stacking images so you do not lose any previous data, only the exposure that was in progress when disconnection occurred,

I have seen instances of software issues on windows which forces the OS to reset the USB bus intermittently, this would also cause a disconnect and then the camera would just re-connect by itself. If you need to unplug and plug it back in again to get it to reconnect it would not be the same problem.

Paul