Flycap2 or Sharp Cap with Firefly MV Mono

[SnakeyJ]

When the guy first started selling them they were $25, I bought one quickly and then about 2 days later they went to $35 and now $45. Still a great deal $45.

Stu,

free market economics! I wish I'd brought two or three to start with - quite a few hot pixels on mine, but they still seem to produce some excellent images for the price and a good/fun intro to planetary imaging.

Jake

[SnakeyJ]

Finally up and running with Firecap 22 beta 37 and x64 and x86 versions of Flycap 2.3.3.38, the firefly mv is now upgraded to fw 1.6.3 - not sure why it wouldn't play before, possibly all that was needed was the restart or re-install of firecap.

Unfortunately despite a few very hazy glimpses of the moon around 18:30hrs, the sky has now reverted to the usual fully obscured mode that is becoming all too familiar. The weather outlook according to the met office app on my android phone, shows no let up for the next four days - though strangely Wed 23rd Jan is omitted and its jumps straight from Tue 22nd to Thu 24th - somewhat ominous portent of doom?

When I do get a gap I shall try and capture some avi of the moon and jupiter and get a comparison against my MA Planetary Imager (Phillips SPC900NC CCD). The firefly mv should perform much better on the lunar and about the same on Jupiter, at least under experienced control. I'll be pleased with recognisable images for both targets and some practice in Registax

[SnakeyJ]

Caught somewhat by surprise with a nice hole in the weather this evening - bit of a mad rush to get out, but just managed to do a quick 9 panel lunar mosaic with the firefly mv, flycapture, registax 6 and MS ICE to stitch it together. Nothing too critical, but the amount of detail is good. I was going to capture in 16 bit, but the setting got reverted back to 8 before I started the captures. As the moon was very bright, the capture is done with a deep red filter - even so the gain and exposure settings had to go well down. I will play with the processing again tomorrow, but here it is rough and ready:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ocammwgrj1uz67m/Moon_9P_Mosaic.jpg

tried to post this in Imaging Lunar (which is prob the wrong place for a newb - and if any admin can move it over to Getting Started with Imaging I'd be very pleased and probably slightly less embarrassed.

[kyokugaisha]

Finally managed to get some shots of Jupiter using the new firefly mv. I tried all sorts of settings but found the biggest difference was made by using the IR cut filter - increasing sharpness and contrast. Both the following shots were recorded using the same equipment (SW 200P / 5x barlow), filter, focus, and were 1500 frames ran through PIPP to centralise, then the best 750 frames stacked with AS!2 and finally run through Lucy Richardson Deconvolution in Astra Image 3 Pro. They were then reduced in size by 25% to improve the detail.

This one was recorded using FireCapture 2.1, using pretty much default settings (about 40 fps).

And this one was recorded through FlyCap2, again with mainly default settings (about 50 fps).

The FlyCap one has less contrast but that could be corrected/improved in PS. Both did the job well.

If only I had a better laptop to record more frames.

[Cath]

Well done Marc

Did you use any flats/darks at all, and any cooling?

[SnakeyJ]

Nice shots Mark,

Interesting to see the different in quality between firecap and flycap 2. Hope to get out and get some footage of Jupiter tomorrow evening (weather permitting), but think I'll have to get out early to avoid the full moon.

Take a look at the Firecap 2.2 beta build 37 - this gives control access to the camera registers to improve gain (following extract from Pipo's Post on Cloudy Nights):

1) "Gain2x". This controls the digital-gain. Namely which are the bits not considered in the 10bit to 8-bit conversion. The button puts F8 in the register 80 of the sensor. This corresponds to an increase x2 of the signal (independently of the actual value of the analog-gain).

2) "SignalBoost". This controls the reference potential of the AD converter. The button puts 00 in the 2C register of the sensor. This corresponds to an increase x1.2 of the signal (independently of the actual value of the analog-gain).

3) "GainBoost". This sets the analog-gain beyond the 12dB standard limit. It puts 7F in the 820 register of the camera. This corresponds to a 24dB gain level. For the moment the intermediate values of the analog-gain between 40 and 7F are not implemented. If you need these you should use Flycap2 as described above. Notice that the off-state of this third button (of just this one) does not work, i.e. it does not restore back the standard level of the analog-gain. However, to restore the standard values, you have just to move the standard control of the gain.

Might be useful to increase sensitivity for LRGB.

Now all we need is a cooling mod and LX mod - probably never going to get sufficient noise reduction for long exposure/DSOs, but would definitely help to reduce the noise - have noticed mine gets quite warm at 60FPS!

[JamesF]

Those are excellent images. Well done.

James

[kyokugaisha]

Thanks guys.

Cath - No don't do flats or darks with the firefly and I can only get about 1500 frames at 50 fps on my old 1G of RAM laptop so it doesn't heat up too much.

Jake - I'll definitely have a look at that although I'm still working my way through 2.1s options. There's a lot in that software!

What I found unusual was that deconvolution was MUCH more effective than wavelets in Registax. The first time this has been the case.

[Cath]

I'm slowly learning what can be done with the camera by going through the cameras SDK/source code and compiling it all from scratch. I've so far had it going at up to 320 fps or so when using the ROI (Region Of Interest) function of the sensor, so one of the things I'm going to be doing shortly is writing a new program for it that will lock on and track a planet in real time whilst keeping the ROI just big enough to cover the planets disk, the ROI area will move across the sensors area in real time, that way the fps can be much higher than 60 fps and so reducing still further the effects of the Earth's atmosphere.

The ROI is where you only read a square/rectangular area of the sensor rather than it's entire area.

The camera has some useful features when you delve into it's working! .. including a companding option which allows you to almost effectively get 12-bit sensitivity out of it's 10-bit ADC - you can then uncompand the 10-bit value to get your 12-bit absolute value giving you finer detail in the dark areas.

Also want to get the program to stream the images live to my tablet so I can at least then focus properly - I have no remote focus on my scope, and so it's very difficult to get good focus when the scopes outside and the PC is inside.

[SnakeyJ]

Cath - I'd be very interested to hear of the developments on your project and always pleased to volunteer for the alpha or beta test programmes! ROI and higher frame rates sounds extremely interesting. Simarlary the compounding options, though I think I need to do some more reading to get a grasp on this! I did find quite a good basic explanation of CCDs at Spectral Instruments http://www.specinst.com/What_Is_A_CCD.html but will need to do a lot more research to get a wider grasp.

I presume that in achieving higher frame rates, you shorten the exposure time of each frame and that the exposure time is less than the frame rate as each exposed frame must also be read from the ccd (binning?). I'm not sure how you would calculate minimum and best exposure rates given a particular scope/barlow combination - but obviously the histogram feature gives a good rule of thumb guide. But am guessing that there is an upper limit achievable with a given scope, CCD and target.

Using ROI would you reduce exposure time and read time by just looking at a specific area of the CCD? This suggests a decrease in noise, which may be lost by increasing gain - but the higher frequency/rate may also generate some more heat.

Please excuse somewhat random thoughts and questions, but seriously trying to get my head around this! But would be very interested if you can clarify/put me straight to reduce the gap in my understanding.

For the time being I think that I will concentrate on experimenting with the more practical side of cooling the damn thing to reduce noise.

[Cath]

Hi Jake

Well, increasing the fps is OK if their is enough light available from the target your trying to image. It's a balancing act really when it comes to frames per second (frame exposure time) and light level, you don't really want to increase the fps if it would mean having to increase the analogue gain to recover brightness, but then increasing fps means you get less atmospheric boiling effects (creates fuzzy images) appearing in each frame taken.

I would imagine the best way to increase fps (with no gain increase) is to stop increasing fps when the sensor/adc is no longer saturated (brightest parts of target are just below the sensor/adc saturation level).

Anyway, I'm still thinking out aloud at the moment, need to get it going and then just experiment to see how it works out.

btw, the Firefly MV sensor is cmos rather than ccd.

But yes, your welcome to any software I write, as is anyone and everyone.

[SnakeyJ]

Hi Cath,

Agree with high framerate to minimse atmospheric/seeing effects - image compression is also a factor at higer framerates, though the ROI feature should limit image size. Lots of experimentation ahead to get to know the optimal settings for this camera, but all interesting and useful learning.

Re the exposure, I take it the histogram is displaying the sensor/adc saturation? I've been trying to hit about 50% to get decent tonal range of the target, but very limited oppurtunity to test this so far this year - hope to get another chance tonight if I can settle the kids early enough

Yes sorry for silly error on CMOS/CCD, it's very hard to concentrate with all this work going on around me!