ZWO ASI1600?

[Thalestris24]

Hi

Was just wondering if anyone has done any video astronomy/eva with any incarnation of the asi1600/qhy163 or similar? On paper they would seem sensitive enough but maybe too many Mb per frame?

Louise

 

[billyharris72]

Hi Louise

It's an interesting thought and don't see why it couldn't be done using binning and area of interest to cut down on the bandwidth needed. Maybe give it a try when (if) I get a bit of cloud free sky.

Billy.

[IanL]

Yes indeed. I did a live astronomy stream for North Essex Astronomical Society this week using an ASI1600MM-C (through a SW ED80). At the risk of reigniting the 'what is video astronomy?' debate, I was using 30 second subs at unity gain, stacked using AstroLive (there is a free version of this for ZWO cameras). Observations I would make based on the first attempt (well second as I did a trial run over the Xmas break):

- The frames are pretty big, so if you want more of a 'near live' experience you're going to want to use USB3 and perhaps cut the frame down to a smaller region of interest. I also have an ASI174MM which I use for Solar and on that camera high frame rates are easy to achieve - rate is limited by exposure settings rather than data transfer and can easily get 15-20FPS when doing millsecond-range exposures for solar. I don't know what the sensitivity would be like for deep sky as have never tried it.

- I haven't used binning so I'm not sure if the frame read-out would be significantly faster on the 1600 or whether it is done in software after read-out. I think the former, but don't know.

- Definitely worth experimenting with higher gain settings to see if you can reduce exposure times.

- The AstroLive software is still very much a 'beta' project. The capture, stacking and display part works fine, but I couldn't get the mount control or target finding/plate solving to work - had some crashes and not enough time to experiment. I just used my existing SGPro set-up to do the target finding - it only takes a second or two to disconnect the camera from one and connect to the other.

- I will be trying some of the other capture/stacking options before our next live stream - the ASI cameras work with all the usual suspects (except LodeStar Live obviously).

- I used Open Broadcast Studio to do the streaming and recording in case anyone else is interested in giving this a whirl. It's great fun but would highly recommend having a script so you know what you're going to say

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvK91Bhs5Mw

https://www.facebook.com/northessexastro/videos/1769067519834976/

https://www.northessexastro.co.uk/live-astronomy-8th-january-2018-galaxies/

[Thalestris24]

Excellent - movie star! Ha ha! I've been thinking about getting either the 1600mm pro or qhy163m for a while now. Just have to save enough...

Thanks

Louise