aparker

Don, Hiten,

Thanks for the detail on the AB - I think I'd be leery of messing with that tiny dial too - not sure my eyes/hands are up to that sort of thing anymore.

I've used my Ultrastar unbinned for exposures ranging from 5 to 60 seconds.  Never saw the black streaks until I tried to use it binned 2x2.  I'll play with some varying binned exposure lengths the next time the work and weather gods align for me...

Interesting about the anti-blooming.  Totally makes sense in the context of 2x2 binning (where I saw it) since that will result in cranking up the individual pixel values 4X on bright stars.  What did Terry say about the adjustment - is it a physical thing in the camera like a teeny dial potentiometer?  Or is it something that can be controlled through software?  I'm not sure that it bugs me - but it certainly would if it happened with unbinned exposures.  Did you try shortening the exposure time to see if that would eliminate it?

Don,

Are you using the Ultrastar with SLL v3?  Are you binning?  I've noticed this black horizontal streaking when using the Ultrastar with 2x2 binning (now possible in SLL v3).  I used the Ultrastar for months in earlier versions of SLL (unbinned of course) and never saw the black streaks, so I don't think it has anything to do with the physical camera.

Alex

A few of the individual constellation links did not work for me (404) when I tried them just now (Vir and Leo did not).  Uma I was able to link to and D/L.

I can't resist one tongue-in-cheek branding suggestion.

If you were to re-christen the project "pretty good charts" then the acronym would be PGC

Martin,

Thanks for pulling these together.  A great resource for the EAA community and deep sky enthusiasts in general.  I look forward to browsing them and dreaming up my next observing session!

Alex

Don,

Kudos for taking the initiative to do this. I look forward to reading and will provide any comments I can based on my so far fairly limited experience with the software.

Great contribution to the SX EAA community!

Alex

This is actually a trick that will no longer work in the next release (V0.13)...

So V0.12 (and previous) automatically connect to the Lodestar camera, but you can use command line arguments to connect to the SX-825, so by starting one instance of LL with no command line arguments (connect to the Lodestar) and one with command line arguments (connect to the SX-825) you can have both running.

The latest code I am working with auto connects to (the first one it finds) lodestar, ultrastar, SX-825 and oculus, so this trick will no longer work when V0.13 gets out there.

However, it is a planned mod later in the future to allow multiple cameras with multiple instances....

In the meantime you can do what I have done and run a copy of PHD2 to support your second camera. I do this with an Orion guider and short FL scope mostly to use as an electronic finderscope.