Does anyone use a QHY5 to capture Spectrum's ?

[johnb]

Does anyone use a QHY5 to capture Spectrum's ?, if so would love ot chat about setting etc

Regards

John B

[jnp]

Hi John,

I was going to prepare a write up of how to use the QHY5 to capture spectra in the next few days. (I am away on business so dont have the screen shots with me). Hope this helps in the meantime.

The video frame rate is determined by the exposure time, the capture region and the performance of your PC.

As a guide for bright stars like Vega/Capella, I might set exposure at 20ms or less, and the gain at 80%. For dimmer targets I might try 90% gain and exposures 100ms up to several seconds. I aim to get a few hundred frames, which allows registax to reject some.

I would also use the sliders on top LH corner to set the capture region to say a 1280 x 40 region. (This makes video files smaller and improves the capture rate). The region size depends on the distance between the Sa100 + sensor and how well your setup can track. I also manually guide using the handset to keep the zero order close to one edge. (My sa100 is 70mm from the sensor so I use the full 1280 pixel width.)

If you are only getting 60 frames per min, this suggests a 1000ms exposure rate or you PC is struggling to capture more (presumably as it is capturing the full sensore size)?

cheers

John

[Merlin66]

John,

I have and use a QHY5 for spectra, but it's the original version, not the video version.

No problems using it under AstroArt for long exposures.