First Light with an Atik 341l - eek

[johnb]

Hi

So its my first time with an Atik 341L 

Sorted focus just about, now exposure length and binning ?

first image is 300 secs with Binning at 1

second image is 300 secs with Binning at 2

Is this what I should be seeing for raw unprocessed images ?

Regards

John b

[Merlin66]

John,

What were you imaging?

What aquisition software?

Cooling on?

The central area seems to give hazy stars (at the top) could be condensation?

[johnb]

Hi

I'm using artemeis capture, colling at -10 and target is M33, I have subsequently been taking 120 sec images and stacked a few in DSS and they look a lot better

John B

[NickK]

That does look like a classic misting up with dew. Did you change any components in the imaging chain? If so it could be that the water vapour settled on one of the components inside (ie the filters or back element lens of the scope. Last night was a very heavy dew and it dripping wet this morning. Small 12V hairdryer to the rescue when this occurs.

Binning will basically combine multiple pixels together - the CCD pixel electrical charge created by light hitting it is converted pooled together when binning and then converted into the pixel value.

So you'll get a larger charge being converted so dim things become brighter at the risk of over saturation as the CCD components on the chip are sometimes only sized for one or two pixel's worth of charge.

Simply put - dim things will be brighter, bright things will saturate quickly when binning which needs to be either managed with exposure length or use HDR with multiple exposures of different lengths (assuming you want to only use binned data).