Problem with Atik Titan

[avoneschen]

I just purchased the Atik Titan Monochrome and am struggling with using it. This is my first CCD and I have never done astrophotography before.

I went through the focusing procedure outlined in the manual and that seems to work just fine. But when I pointed my scope at Saturn and took a snap shot, there was a lot of noise. I could make out the glow of Saturn, especially when I upped the exposure to 2 seconds or more. But anything at 1 second or shorter produced so much noise the screen just looked like a bunch of black and white pixels. When I tried aiming the scope at DSOs, no matter what exposure setting I used the screen was just a bunch of black and white pixels.

NOTE: I used both ArtemisCapture and AstroArt to take pictures and they both did the same thing.

I tried using different filters (RGB) but the result was the same. I was in a fairly dark sky area... but still had the same issue. It was impossible to see any starts in all of the noise (unless it was really bright like Arcturus).

NOTE: when I took all of the noisy Saturn images and stacked them in AstroArt the noise went away. But if the capture process only ever shows noise, it will make it difficult to see what I'm doing and pointing at.

The attached image is when I set the exposure to 2 seconds. Anything less and the noise completely drowned out Saturn. For galaxies and other DSOs, I only ever got complete noise.

Any thoughts or ideas on how I can solve this issue would be greatly appreciated!

[andrew s]

Did you use a focusing mask and forget to take it off or lens cap? Andrew

[avoneschen]

No I didn't.

[Cornelius Varley]

What telescope are you using and do you know the capture settings used (gain etc).

Peter

[avoneschen]

It was a 10" TMB Refractor f/9. There are no capture settings except for exposure and bins. Gain was not listed in any of the programs, so I assume the camera doesn't support this.

[fatwoul]

I have a Titan, and occasionally use it for planetary imaging. I operate it with Artemis Capture.

Do you have "PRE" selected in the exposure menu? Pre enables what they call fast download mode. I'll be honest and admit I don't know what it actually changes about the way the images are dealt with, but when I have it switched on, the images do get a lot, lot noisier.

Do you have "Auto Stretch" selected? I seem to be alone in this, but I find auto stretch plays havoc with my imaging, so I use it for finding objects, and then promptly switch it off, and return the sliders to 0 and 65535.

Don't worry, you're not stuck with a turkey - the camera is more than capable of producing good images of both planets and DSOs. I am using a quicker scope than you (MN190, so f/5.3) but the ICX424 seems to be fiendishly sensitive, so I reckon its just something we need to figure out about the software.

[fatwoul]

Just googled the scope in question. Good Lord...

[NickK]

But anything at 1 second or shorter produced so much noise the screen just looked like a bunch of black and white pixels.

I think there's a couple of points here.

Firstly Planets are usually brighter than DSOs by a massive amount. I use sub one second exposures to take planet photos to prevent saturation.

When the titan is running with short exposures it automatically adjusts the levels. When the camera doesn't detect a bright object this causes an appearance of noise. Once the planet appears on the field of view then it will automatically lock on to the correct levels and you'll have a very low noise image (see the raw single sub of jupiter at 0.01 sec exposure Pentax 105SDP at 1340mm f/12ish).

I've used this for lunar, planets and white-light solar (0.000001 sec exp sun spot sub attached) where the exposure is sub 1 second.

For DSOs exposures in the order of minutes are common. When the Titan detects this then it switches off this auto-levelling mode. The titan is no different to other cameras in the requirement to remove any hot pixels or noise (but the sony sensor makes this almost not required!). For DSOs I aim for 5-10 minutes although I have had 20 minute exposures on the 383L+!