Help with Artemis please?!

[Johnboy2011]

I had first light last night with my new 314L+ and got up and running very easily. The problem I had was after finishing a sequence I could not get anything to preview on screen when I wanted to swap targets. The camera was connected as I could see the countdown of the exposure.

I am sure it mst be something simple and obvious, any ideas?!

Oh, and how do you take flats?!

Thanks,

John

[Johnboy2011]

Just to add when I ask how to take flats I mean specifically in Artemis. With the Canon I used APT which was pretty much an automatic function.

[Johnboy2011]

Ok, I think I may have this. I think it may be dodgy USB after a bit of testing today, more experiments required!

John

[Gib007]

Just to add when I ask how to take flats I mean specifically in Artemis. With the Canon I used APT which was pretty much an automatic function.

Personally I stick an A4 sheet of blank paper to my wardrobe doors, which are uniformly lit in sunlight during daytime. With that, I place just the OTA on a chair with the CCD camera in the focuser and with the same focus level, orientation and optical train (filters, etc) as when I was doing imaging the night before. The temperature is also set to be the same. I aim the telescope carefully at the A4 sheet of blank paper (green laser pointer helps) and fire away with a short-ish exposure of like 1 second. I check the FITS image in FITS Liberator and if the mean and median are about 20,000 (out of the 16-bit range), I keep it and take more of that exposure time. If the mean and median are way below or way above 20,000, I alter the exposure time accordingly and re-take a test shot. Once you have a sufficient number of these at about 20,000 mean and median (from 16-bit), you're sorted.

[Gina]

You don't need to worry about temperature with flats.

[Gib007]

You don't need to worry about temperature with flats.

Indeed. I only set mine to the same temperature as when imaging because I take my dark and bias images straight after the flats. I know that if I don't do it at the beginning, I'll forget!

[andyboy1970]

If you get no preview and it still does the countdown it is usually because the USB cable has been disturbed, close Artemis and re-start it.

[Davey-T]

You need to change filters and do flats for each as you get a bit of variation on the 20000 ish reading between filters. May need to increase / decrease exposure .

Dave

[Yoddha]

John, you can use APT with your Atik too

[andyo]

For flats I use an electroluminescent panel from earlsman about £20.As Gibb007 said use fitsliberator to get the adu around 20,000-24,000 mean for each filter.I use the sequence setting and when you have the exposure settings right you can save these sequence settings in artemis capture for next time.Next time you use the setting it may need tweaking a bit though.