Ibbo!

I am currently under the solar cover taking sers.

I guess mine are out of date as I'm using the Point Grey(now Flir) Chameleon giving me full disc at 50 to58 fps on the Lunt 60mm.

This cam will also give me upto 160 fps using ROI on brighter planets.

To do this with full disc I had to also upgrade the PC to a fast SSD I have since installed a PCIe ssd (not allPC,scan takeone) and this has eliminated buffering.

My Point grey Blackfly gives me upto 45fps

I also have a ZWO colour 178 that can do around 200fps but hat ihave only used for planets with the C11 or luna with the ED80.

I have pulled the Blackfly out of semi retirement as it does not give me NR,s with the powermatewhich the Chameleon does.

It might also be better with the Cak on the ED 80 as the Chameleon gives me a problem with vignetting with BF600.

I am waiting while lockdown ends so Ican get my FS 60 back which is more suited f/lwise with the Cak.

8 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

GOING, GOING, soon to be gone!

It had gone tonight as I was having issues with cam drivers.

Thanks for your comments.

I have not tried this setup before and it was a test of concept to start with and seeing as the data looked promising & the weather was co-operating  even with the issues so I decided to carry on.

The 2 nights were dumped as one night one of the ccd's was slightly loose in the focuser and rotated the second lot the focus was not quite right.

Maybe Icould have rescued some data from the other cam but it was easier just to not include it.

15 hours ago, David Smith said:

Ask away! I just push the exposure settings up and use 2x2 binning on the 178. As an example my surface exposures yesterday were 2ms with gain at 60 but my proms were 2.6ms with gain at 160. Without binning my exposure would have been 7-8ms and gain at about the same level, so it does make a big difference as the longer exposure has a knock on affect on frame rate too.

Last couple of days I learnt how to manipulate the tone curve in ImPPG so am finding proms in my surface captures. All new to me.

 

Thanks David.

I tried upping the exp and gain and could see nothing -maybe it was lost in the murk.

More experiments needed.

3 minutes ago, David Smith said:

Nice. Busy today so was not able to take advantage of the clear skies early this morning

I missed out today.

Question if I may -how do you capture proms in Cak?

Turn the auto stretch off.

Take a very, very short exposure in daylight start at the 0.001 and work up, you may even have to mask the scope down.

If you move the camera you will need new flats.

Darks will be OK though, I use my darks for months.

A few years ago when I used the PST mod, small chip camera and the permanent mount I used The Sky mosaic function to automatically do the panes with a 20% overlap.

I did 15 sec captures and joined them either using Photomerge in PS or ICE.

If that failed I did sometimes e mail them to a friend who had autopan giga (£££££) and if that did not sort it nothing else would.

Not sure this helps you.

On 11/05/2020 at 01:01, Merlin66 said:

Steve,

On all my solar ED80's I've fitted a geared tooth belt drive to the 10:1 focuser knob. Using the SW/Orion accutrac motor.

Works well for me.

 

I think I have a motor like that somewhere.

My Eddy is so ancient it only has one speed focuser 😃

For the portable rig Sharpcap and a finder and old cam I rigged up for the purpose.

For the home pier/mount Sharpcap then drift aligned a good while ago, maybe 2 years.

4 hours ago, David Smith said:

Oh, Ca-K too. Love it

Thanks

Need to be quicker with the panes.

2 hours ago, David Smith said:

Awesome, welcome to the Ca-K imagers club

Thanks.

I needed to be a bit quicker with the panes(9-5 image)

I also need to fit an electric focuser to Eddy if I carry on using him for Cak.

I have the bluetooth dongle and have had to uninstall it and reinstall it on occasion.

Check it has assigned a com port # that ascom will recognise, IIRC mine assigned it as com port 30 but ascom/eqmod only goes up to 16, I could wrong on the actual numbers .

Ha defeated by the cloud today.

3 pane 80mm Cak sol.

Click for full res.

1 hour ago, Merlin66 said:

Well done, great shots!

If the cloud down here ever departs I may be able to image....

 

Thanks Ken.

Hope you get some clear soon.