All pentax DSLR owners

[austen4]

Hello all,

As you may know many canons and nikons all have good software for astrophotography uses. However pentax never really made one for most of it's DSLRs. You may of heard of PK-Tether with is a remote that controls the camera from a pc/laptop and can save the images jsut taken. This is good for 30 second exposures or what is the highest for your pentax DSLR. But in bulb mode I have problems using it and I get an error saying " Wrong Data - to long bulb time" using the periodic shooting mode which is what you want to do unless you enjoy sitting with your laptop/pc holding down the shutter button and waiting for each exposure.(I do not know if you get this error with other models of pentax DSLRs). But today I thought of something which may work.

I thought that a program that would do automatic mouse clicks, holds and waits could control the camera when started in bulb mode. The program that finally worked and is quite simple and easy to use is "Auto Clicker Asoftech". The program is easy to use and you can set it to a range of times in seconds,minutes and milliseconds.

This is the base of what would be depending on the exposure time :

1.Mouse to move to ***,*** (co-ordinates on the screen)

2.Mouse left down

3.Wait (X) milliseconds (will convert automatically if you enter with seconds/minutes)

4.Mouse left up

5.Wait (X+20,000ms) this allows time for the camera to process the image with some time spare just incase.

X = Xposure Time

This would then be repeated for how many exposures you require.

This picture in the attachments is a little explanation of settings.

Thanks for looking, sorry if it may be a bad explanation/tutorial I have never done something like this before but just thought I should let people know about it. Feel free to ask any questions I will try to answer them as fully as possible.

[kamayok3]

Thanks for the great tips!

[austen4]

Thanks for the great tips!

no problem happy to help