prejto

Hello, Any chance any of you own one of these Snap Caps by Gemini? I have one on my TEC180fl and it works well. Unfortunately, Andras, of the Italian company Gemini, passed away last April. His website is still up but as for drivers and firmware is now pretty useless. I guess nobody has taken over (yet???). I'm auditioning Voyager. It should control a Gemini SnapCap, but mine refuses to connect. Leonardo says it must be the firmware I'm running. The cap r7uns fine with the supplied Gemini software which is now 5/6 years old. I noticed that Voyager will run scripts and the SnapCap is supposed to run by script. Unfortunately I could never figure out how to run it this way and gave up. Does anyone here know how to do this or have a working script? Thanks! Peter

Thanks all for your kind words. I agree re the SX-46. It often does not pay to be an early adopter of new gear. Live and learn! But, support from SX was excellent - but one could strongly argue should have been unnecessary! Right now, however, the camera is very solid and a good performer. Cooling is very fast and the latest board revision improves on noise (which was already good). The camera ships with an odd somewhat annoying "feature" that disables cooling on short exposures. This makes it very hard to automate taking bias or flat frames. It also disables cooling when focusing so that the first image after focusing will show a bizarre temperature. Fortunately this can be disabled with a board flash. SX said I might see increased noise but I can detect no change at all other than the camera behaving as one would expect. Re the TEC flattener, this was odd and totally unsuspected for a long time. I did buy the FF used (with the OTA) and then did not use the FF for several years. It has gone back to TEC in partial exchange for their new FRC (.9 reducer/FF) with 30 mm more back focus. When I shook the flattener I could hear a small rattling of an internal lens. The lens ring seals were unbroken and I chose not to investigate further. I was just hugely relieved to have finally isolated the problem of a 220 micron shift from red to blue! Without the FF I could not measure reliably any shift from R to B.

I gathered a ton of data on this nebula as I chased equipment problems: 10 hours RGB (5 min subs) and 16 hours of Ha (15 min subs). After not being able to complete a 2nd photo for nearly a year I was quite determined and actually lost count of the amount of data I had. In any case you can certainly not have too much data! After something like 5 main board revisions I think the SX-46 is finally stable. The other issue I had been chasing was traced to a bad flattener causing a large focus offset between red and blue. As a result I ended up throwing away all my luminance data and created a synthetic L from the RGB. I blended in Ha to both L and R. The full size image is here: https://www.astrobin.com/full/406649/0/ Thanks for looking! Peter (Sydney, Australia)