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Showing results for tags 'qhy5l-ii'.
Found 27 results
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The weekend seemed to be party in the best way, the night before I had received the new camera, the QHY5L-II and I had installed the drivers that seemed to go, the sky was finally clear with good seeing. But I did not know what was waiting for me in the morning. Looking at pictures online I spotted a pair of gigantic prominences, what better time to try the new camera, I prepared relatively calm the equipment, the air is fresh and already I foretaste of a great timelapse of one of the two, asap the filter went in the temperature I pointed the sun and I have the first surprise: firecapture freezzed every two to three trial and error seems to happen by changing the settings of the camera or moving the subject, there seems to be a bug that blocks everything when the screen is overexposed or quickly moves the picture; you can understand that disconnect and restart the software every time I want to rotate the picture or change the barlow is inconceivable, I try different combinations of firecapture and drivers but I come to nothing. As if it were not enough with the new versions of firecapture that manage the QHY I can not get my mythical chameleon, does not recognize her own, arriving at the solution of having two versions of drivers and two versions of firecapture to be able to use both. The new camera then proves to have the same defect of the previous QHY-Magzero-Allccd and company, the sensor and slides are perpetually dirty, although I try to clean it I cannot reach a good result, only at the end of the session I removed everything, wash the sensor for a few minutes, and I close with one of my clear filter of the Baader. I hope will disappear also the random reflection that I had noticed on its original clear filter. Unfortunately, however, the problems are not over yet, in fact the most mangy cannot not be solved, the structure of the CMOS sensor goes into interference with my optical train Halpha, images with heavy newton bands force me to use the chameleon for the disc and try to use the qhy5 on prominence, only on a high-contrast subject seem to hide the problem. Maybe some other combination of a barlow / filters might not have those problem but in my case it was an apocalypse. : Wink: But I must take formal note that it is faster and sensitivity is on the same level. In the afternoon I started shooting a timelapse but the dramatic worsening of the seeing made me give up after half an hour. However, I am attaching the result of so much suffering and sweat (there were at least 32 degrees ) and the video of the last week solar events I hope you enjoy. Chameleon QHY5L-II QHY5L-II- 5 replies
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Getting close to ending the season for observing. Not a lot done this year as I'm still recovering from surgery and my 15 year old has been helping quite a bit. These are tow from yesterday. Sky was clear and reasonably good seeing. Jupiter was rushed before it dissappeared behind a tall hedge and Saturn is so low. Nevertheless, I think this are worth sharing here :-) CPC800 & QHY5L-II. >1500 frames each processed with PIPP, AS2! and PS5. Colour could be better but I find that improving colour sometimes leads to some detail being lost. Comments much welcome!!!
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From the album: Lunar and Planetary Images
Venus 24.03.2017 imaged using Skywatcher Equinox 80 and QHY5L-II monochrome planetary camera© vicky050373
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I has some serious issues getting the gear working last night. PA was not a big problem, but getting the ED80 to co-operate with the star finder and get everything balanced was a little nightmare. By the time everything was ready to go the full moon started to brighten up the sky. I decided to have a quick go at Saturn knowing it was a lot to ask from the scope and these are the results using TV2.5 Powermate and after using AS2! and a little PS. Drizzled 3x But I know these are nothing to compare with the previous poster's very impressive C11 shots.
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Just experimenting with Jupiter, comparing the two cameras above. Both pics taken through Mak 127 with 2.5x barlow 1st one is SPC900 2nd is with QHY5L-IIc I didn't really process them much but I'm amazed how much more detail is in the webcam pic although I'm pretty sure I'm using completely the wrong settings for the QHY5. Ah well still learning Interesting to see the difference in size with the same setup & both done in 640x480 thanks for looking
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From the album: Lunar and Planetary Images
Venus imaged during the afternoon of 20.04.2018. Although imaged in broad daylight, the very short exposures required, just a couple of miliseconds, means the sky looks black. Such short exposures are required to prevent the image over exposing as Venus is so bright. Celestron 8SE and QHY5L-II monochrome camera with Celestron LX 2 x barlow. AVI stacked in Registax with minor adjustments in wavelets. No post-processing other than a slight crop.© vicky050373
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Hi all Novice alert ! I’ve just bought a 2nd hand QHY5L-II-C to use for autoguiding with PHD2. I plugged it in today for a quick test and I am little disappointed that it seems to have quite a few hot/stuck pixels. I thought that the dark library or bad pixel map functions in PHD would solve this problem and clean up the image a bit, but they both seem to make things a lot worse. The results don’t seem at all smooth and they look more like a blizzard of white dots, is that normal ? I’m a complete beginner with this so I’m sure I’ve probably done something stupid to get these results. I did follow the PHD manual instructions tho (I think). Any thoughts/advice on where I am going wrong ? -
Just having a little play with the QHY5L-II, prior to modding - but wanted to have a quick attempt at M13 last night. I was actually quite pleased with the quality of the resulting frames and took 100 x 3sec light frames (red channel only) and 10 x darks. All frames saved as TIFF from source AVI using PIPP. However, no matter what star detection threshold settings I put in to DSS it finds no stars in any of the subs. My reference frame is below: Whilst this is certainly nothing special, I'm sure I have more stars than hot pixels! I've had a quick look through a couple of tutorials and googled no star detection in dss (only hits seem to relate to EOS FITS frames). Have I done something fundamentally wrong on the capture or am I missing something obvious in DSS?
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Okay I've had my QHY5L-II mono for just over a month and have been itching to take a look under the hood to consider options for cooling this super little camera. The camera uses the Aptina MT9M034 1.2Mpix (1280x960 active pixel) 1/3" sensor with Peak QE at 74% (datasheet available at http://www.aptina.com/products/image_sensors/mt9m034/). This is the same sensor used in the ZWO ASI120MM. The current drivers/firmware support shutter speeds from 0.020s to 600s, 14bit ADC giving 8bit or 12 bit colour depth and with USB2 interface and ROI support can produces some very respectable frame rates even on Saturn ( 400x400 ROI @ 8bit giving 75FPS for L @ 85% gain, 65FPS for R @95% gain - dropping to around 45-50FPS for B @ 99% gain. Noise levels seem very good, even at max gain for shorter exposures, way better than my previous experience with the Pt Grey Firefly Mono - but there are a few (3-4) hotpixels showing up on high gain short exposures and the noise levels build up with exposure length. The camera body is noticeably warm to the touch during extended video capture and this will only worsen as ambient temps increase towards summer. Interestingly, QHY list a 'Super Radiator' accessory for this on the product data sheet. Though I have been in contact with QHY, who say this is not available currently and were unable to advise on manufacture/availability - though did clarify that it would be a passive sleeve/fin design to slip over the 1.25" body of the camera. My curiosity suitably piqued and finding no information on the internals or cooling mods online - I decided to risk voiding the warranty for a little (cautious) investigation: The good news is that the camera is very nicely made and is already designed to draw the heat of the cmos and main processor via an internal aluminium bulkhead to the outer case. So it should be very simple to make an external passive heatsink and fan. For active (TEC) cooling it would be very simple to add an external 20-30W peltier fitted to a copper collar and it should also be possible to fit a smaller device 5W? directly to the back of the bulkhead. The case itself would lend itself to fitting a small dessicant tube and the modular construction and long ribbon cable would also make it very suitable for rehousing in a custom case if desired. Given the experience with cooling the firefly, I think this offers considerably more options for a neater and more efficient cooling solution and I would hope to easily achieve 25-30 deg below ambient with 80-85% reduction in noise at max gain. Given the current price of £ 229 (roughly 8x what I paid for the firefly), there is certainly more financial risk - but the mods look far simpler and will avoid any direct contact with the CMOS, so I feel well up for the attempt!
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Lovely skies here last night until moon rise, but still suffering some tracking problems with the HEQ5 and I gave up on guiding after a brief trial of the new PHD2 beta. However, managed to catch some reasonable data on M57 & M27 with unguided 30 sec exposures and have binned the worst of the star trails. Lot more processing on this in Gimp2, now I've discovered the GMIC tools - even some deconvolution for Nick (though without PSF). Even managed to stretch out a little glimpse of IC1296, which given the size and magnitude is pretty good going with this camera! Despite good transparancy the seeing wasn't great - though still better than my previous attempts at this nebula.
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What am I doing wrong to get planetary images like these attached? Or maybe I should be asking what am I actually doing right? I've tried a few times to images planets with my QHY5L-ii mono camera through the C9.25 both with and without IR/UV block filter and get the same blurred results every time. I've checked collimation, and focus using a star mask. It's pretty good really, and I know the camera works fine because I've used it to get some good lunar shots. I'm imaging thought sharpcap software and have processed the images with registax or autostakkert and get very similar results. Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?? All suggestions welcome, thanks!
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From the album: Lunar and Planetary Images
Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. Taken using QHY5L-II colour planetary camera and 8SE, using a Celestron X-Cel LX 2 x barlow. All AVIs stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS Elements 11 (composite image)© vicky050373
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From the album: Lunar and Planetary Images
Jupiter showing the Great Red Spot (GRS) and 4 Galilean moons - William Optics FLT-110 and QHY5L-II colour camera© vicky050373
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I've been working on this one for a while on and off. It's gone through various rounds of PIPP, stacking, drizzling and PS re-sampling. The colours are not right but this is the best resolution I've yet gotten from the C8 tube. And I'm a little impressed myself, so I thought I would share :-)
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Two shots of Jupiter and Mars from last night. The seeing was not the best but better than recent nights so I thought it was worth posting. In use: CPC800 & QHY5l-II. AVIs post-processed using PIPP, AS!2, Nikon CNX2. I'm still getting to grips with processing Mars...
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A stack of Jupiter GRS transit last night. The seeing was not great (lots of turbulence from my site) and this is as good as I managed to process a stack of 1000 frames with PIPP, A2S and PS. This is the second time I went out this year to do stuff with my scopes so I'm happy with the results. I tried to sharpen but that introduced a lot of ugly artifacts. The first time was to test the Starsense camera. I will report on that in a separate post.
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From the album: Solar Images
Stacked and processed image of The Sun and AR2542 (formerly known as AR2529) taken this afternoon using William Optics FLT-110 refractor, 1.25" Lunt Herschel Wedge, Celestron X-Cel LX 2 x barlow and QHY5-L-II monochrome planetary camera. 800 frame AVI processed through RegiStax6 to stack and select best 25% of frames and then wavelets added. It was good to see what was left of fabulous sunspot AR2529 which I previously imaged on 17th April prior to it's journey around the farside of the sun.© vicky050373
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From the album: Solar System
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A stack of 1500 frames from 3x500 AVIs with EZPlanetary using a QHY5L-II C on a CPC800 on a wedge aligned using Starsense. My son (15) volunteered to stay out and help with focusing, keeping cables tidy, etc. Just because of him, one of the best nights ever - actually, this is the first proper observation night after big surgery (3 level ADSF) in December. Great to not do it alone! As Saturn is so low I was surprised we got this far on a 8" F/10. Processing: PIPP - AutoStacker2 - PS (to sort out colour balance and sharpen things).
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Finally received my QHY5l-II from Astronomia so had a go at setting up PHD2 last night/this morning.Finding stars with this camera was easy compare to the SPC900! Equipment used: iOptron ZEQ25GT,SW 200PDS with an Optistar AR80/QHY5l-II piggy backed,default settings in PHD2.Once locked onto a star it all then went pete tongue,the graph below tells the story of my 1st attempt,the RA just dropped off the scale! So after this I altered the counter weight on the mount which gave me this graph,maybe get the balance better on the mount? Then the dec went 'off course' for some reason? Managed a 5 minute sub with this but compared to some graphs I've seen this isn't right! Any tips etc much appreciated! -
Very pleased with this, though always room for more improvement. I did capture LRGB channels for this, but have ditched the Luminance channel as it introdcued too much noise to the final image. However, the RGB is pretty good to my mind - perhaps some work on reducing the halo's on brighter stars and the background colour gradient: I've got two screens at work and the image definitely looks better on the newer bigger one! The older/smaller one is really pretty ropey for processing purposes. Mind you as I get older the amount of natural guassian blur in my eyes is definitely increasing - eyesight check next month
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Mars, Saturn and Jupiter 28.05.2016
Vicky050373 posted a gallery image in Lunar and Planetary Images
From the album: Lunar and Planetary Images
Had another look at my files and I seem to have got a bit more detail out. Thank you everyone for your advice. Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. Taken using QHY5L-II colour planetary camera and 8SE, using a Celestron X-Cel LX 2 x barlow. All AVIs stacked in RegiStax6 and processed in PS Elements 11 (composite image)© vicky050373
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From the album: Lunar and Planetary Images
Using QHY5L-II colour planetary camera and 8SE on NEQ6 Pro SynScan. 4 x 500 frame AVIs, joined and processed in PIPP to centralise image and then stacked in RegiStax6 to select best 25% of frames. It's my first attempt at imaging Saturn, so I'm happy to have an observation for my scrapbook© vicky050373
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From the album: Solar Images
Stacked and processed image of AR12529 taken using William Optics FLT-110 refractor, 1.25" Lunt Herschel Wedge, Baader 7nm H-alpha filter, Celestron X-Cel LX 2 x barlow and QHY5L-II Monochrome planetary camera. 1000 frame AVI processed through PIPP to select the best 50%, then through RegiStax6 to stack and add wavelets.© vicky050373
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From the album: Solar System
