Atik 314L+ First Light

[JacobvonChorus]

Hello,

I was able to get my Atik 314L+M out a week ago for a first light. The moon was up but I decided to go for M31 with just my light pollution filter because M31 is a nice bright and easy to find target. Being -12°C out, my mount ended up freezing up so the manual controls stopped working. With the temperature continuing to fall, I decided to just set a sequence of 2 minute exposures binned 1x1. Only one of them was not terribly streaked because of bad tracking.

I plate solved the image and discovered I wasn't terribly far off from M31. While not a great image I did learn a number of things from it. First of all, I am going to have to use flats. My DSLR didn't require them, I didn't have vignetting and the chip was nice and uniform and dust bunnies were never a problem being too far from the sensor. With the 314, dust bunnies are a problem as can be seen at the top. On the right of the image, there is a darker streak that is removable with flats as I found out. So the conclusion is flats are a must now. Do other 314L+ users find they have to do this, doesn't seem like a problem to me. The flat is used with this image wasn't very good because I took it later, after I had used an air puffer on the sensor and replaced the old dust bunnies with new ones. What I like about this image is it shows quite a few stars for 2 minutes for such a small field of view. This area of the sky doesn't have many stars yet this camera captured them. The histogram was also nice, especially for a single frame. I bet that noise would pretty much disappear with half a dozen frames. With my DSLR, I am used to having to get at least 3-4 hours of exposure to get a good image so I am excited to see how this camera performs under better conditions. I don't see any obvious hot pixels, though that is pretty hard to detect with a single frame.

One thing that concerned me is when I brought my camera inside, the moisture in my house quickly formed a thick layer of frost on the camera body which then melted into a lot of water, much more than I expected. I plugged the camera in a couple hours after (giving it a chance to dry). Could that water have caused any damage? It wasn't like it was flowing but there was still quite a bit.

Jacob

[Gina]

I've found the opposite in going from DSLR to the Atik 314L+. When I tested my Atik 314L+ with EFW2 and Gerd Neumann EL panel atop my ED80 dew shield the other night after imaging was stopped by cloud, I was surprised how even the illumination was. I moved around the screen in Artemis and the count only changed by a percentage or two. No vignetting and not a sign of a dust bunny. I've never had that with my DSLR. Yes, I was very careful not to get any dust in when I assembled the equipment and put all the filters in but I was surprised that I had actually succeeded in keeping dust out. Of course the wet weather does mean that all outdoor dust is well grounded but with a solid fuel burning Rayburn indoors...

I think it unlikely that melting frost will cause a problem - I think the casing is sealed. Probably best to let it dry out befire powering up again though just in case.

[JacobvonChorus]

I posted some flats and biases under the Discussions - Cameras topic. I did let the camera dry and that seems to be looking fine. When looking at the sensor, when the light hits it at the right angle, I do notice what looks like a small scratch on the glass covering. I don't know where this came from, it was like that when I got it.

Jacob von Chorus

[johnrt]

I use my Atik 314l+ with both an ED80 triplet and a 6" RC - I would consider flats a must for imaging with both scopes. I also use bias frams but don't bother with darks - the chip is super clean on these cameras.