Altair Astro GPCam meteor quick start guide

[Coastliner]

Hi,

I have the above camera and have also bought the 150 degree meteor lens. I have not had chance to use it yet as the weather has been so bad in South Wales, but I am traveling further north this weekend and am hoping to catch some meteors. Has anyone used one of these? If so. could you give a quick-start as to settings in either Sharpcap or the Altair program?

Tx,

Neil.

[bruno]

I think if you go on the site where you download the drivers for altair astro cam there is a link to the forum and the owner you could ask him ( you have to ask for an invite to join the forum)

[ChrisLX200]

Which camera - colour or mono?  The mono is to be preferred as it is more sensitive, but both work and if colour you will have to use considerably longer exposures.

You will need to install the drivers available on the Altair website, and (at the moment) I would recommend using Altair Capture for the simple reason it will do on-the-fly dark frame subtraction. You can build up a library of dark frames - use 10 per time exposure time - and for capturing meteors I would use (for mono) anywhere between 3 and 10 second exposures, the length really depends on how dark the sky is which limits what you can get away with. Use continuous capture for every frame so you don't miss anything. Afterwards, I compress the data using VirtualDub and H.264 CODEC to save space. I would really prefer to use FireCapture but it seems that program does not yet support the GPCAMs, my AllSky camera uses a camera similar to the GPCAM mono (QHY5L-II) which IS supported by FireCapture.

ChrisH

[Coastliner]

Thanks both - I have the colour version and will give your suggestions a go.