i recently bought a bresser planetary and deep sky camera hd

[Samantha]

hello 

firstly thank you for letting me join the forum and secondly I have borderline learning disabilities which is speech problems, people find it hard to understand what I am saying so I apologise in advance if cannot make out nor understand how I type things etc because either my brain thinks ahead or behind my trail of thought rushes also.

 

what I am wondering is I recently brought a bresser planetary and deep sky hd camera I go onto the software that came with it called toup sky what I am wondering is what is meant by gain is it for use of video recording or photography part of it such as is it like a noise reduction or is it basically a darkening the image of background so the foreground becomes more into detail for both planetary and deep sky?

what would be the best gain settings for doing video and photography capture with it ? the screen on my laptop shows only a blank yellow or white screen but I take it when I attach it to my 6inch Newtonian reflector that it will change to recognise dark sky etc followed by do I need to get a mask at bottom of my secondary mirror to help get a lot sharper images?

 

thank you for your time and help I hope this makes sense for everyone as I am brand new at having a go of imaging with using a planetary and dee[p sky hd camera 

 

Samantha 

[happy-kat]

Hi

Your telescope will act as a lens for your bresser camera, so the camera will not show any image other than maybe light patches until it is connected to a telescope or lens. When used with your telescope it would be focused by using the focuser to adjust focus.

You might find more support if you try using something like SharpCap to control your bresser camera than the software that came with your camera.

[vlaiv]

Hi Samantha and welcome to SGL.

Gain is a bit like volume on your computer speakers. When you turn the volume up - you hear louder music, when you turn volume down it becomes quieter. If you turn it down too much you won't be able to hear anything and if you turn volume too much up - sound will get distorted. Similar thing happens with gain when you are recording - either video or still image with your camera. Gain controls brightness of your recorded image. Too low gain and image will be dark, too much gain and image will be too bright. Keep gain somewhere in the middle to get nice looking image.

Fact that you are getting white or yellow image is quite all right. Astronomy cameras come without lens attached and what you see is just unfocused light being picked up by camera. Telescope acts as a lens and when you attach your camera to telescope and find proper focus - image will be nice and sharp.

[Samantha]

40 minutes ago, happy-kat said:

Hi

Your telescope will act as a lens for your bresser camera, so the camera will not show any image other than maybe light patches until it is connected to a telescope or lens. When used with your telescope it would be focused by using the focuser to adjust focus.

You might find more support if you try using something like SharpCap to control your bresser camera than the software that came with your camera.

Thank you for your help and getting back to me my telescope is a skywatcher 150p  newtonian reflector on an eq3 mount of the synscan handset although i use now the little skywatcher wifi dongle. I will try sharp cap give it a go see what results i get my focus on the telescope is manual so when i adjust the focus i can watch it happening on the laptop even adjust the brightness through the laptop. So with sharp cap i can use it to take both photos and record  what would be the best seconds for taking photos and also how long for recording along with sorry for asking the noise reduction is it best to have it on low to cut out the amount of noise level or if have it on high show things i do not want like say all background noise to ruin main part of the picture that i am taking. 

 

[Samantha]

40 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Hi Samantha and welcome to SGL.

Gain is a bit like volume on your computer speakers. When you turn the volume up - you hear louder music, when you turn volume down it becomes quieter. If you turn it down too much you won't be able to hear anything and if you turn volume too much up - sound will get distorted. Similar thing happens with gain when you are recording - either video or still image with your camera. Gain controls brightness of your recorded image. Too low gain and image will be dark, too much gain and image will be too bright. Keep gain somewhere in the middle to get nice looking image.

Fact that you are getting white or yellow image is quite all right. Astronomy cameras come without lens attached and what you see is just unfocused light being picked up by camera. Telescope acts as a lens and when you attach your camera to telescope and find proper focus - image will be nice and sharp.

 

Just now, Samantha said:

Thank you for your help and getting back to me my telescope is a skywatcher 150p  newtonian reflector on an eq3 mount of the synscan handset although i use now the little skywatcher wifi dongle. I will try sharp cap give it a go see what results i get my focus on the telescope is manual so when i adjust the focus i can watch it happening on the laptop even adjust the brightness through the laptop. So with sharp cap i can use it to take both photos and record  what would be the best seconds for taking photos and also how long for recording along with sorry for asking the noise reduction is it best to have it on low to cut out the amount of noise level or if have it on high show things i do not want like say all background noise to ruin main part of the picture that i am taking. 

 

 

40 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Hi Samantha and welcome to SGL.

Gain is a bit like volume on your computer speakers. When you turn the volume up - you hear louder music, when you turn volume down it becomes quieter. If you turn it down too much you won't be able to hear anything and if you turn volume too much up - sound will get distorted. Similar thing happens with gain when you are recording - either video or still image with your camera. Gain controls brightness of your recorded image. Too low gain and image will be dark, too much gain and image will be too bright. Keep gain somewhere in the middle to get nice looking image.

Fact that you are getting white or yellow image is quite all right. Astronomy cameras come without lens attached and what you see is just unfocused light being picked up by camera. Telescope acts as a lens and when you attach your camera to telescope and find proper focus - image will be nice and sharp.

Thank you for getting back to me. Basically if i understand it right then when i take either photos or do recording if i put the gain settings on something like 30% for example that would make the image bright enough on both recording and photographing with it ? The other thing i have is where i live i got problems of street lights and a neighbour on other side of our street which is a diagonal house is there a way i can even though i got no dew shield to take the light out or just use my telescope cap cover and take one cap off still can do photography and recording? Because when i got when neighbour light come on due to people not only walking by but vehicles in our street triggering it will that cause same as led streetlights effect the imaging mode to point i still have to go brighter again or go darker down to about 20% to cut out that excess light? This is the problem where i live there is way too might light pollution and i only have one place i can go to do not only observing etc but is the only dark sky recognised place at the moment which makes it difficult trying to find right balance of taking out any unwanted lights aswell. 

[happy-kat]

I also live with streetlights and have to work around them. Unless your neighbour's light is very high you hopefully wont find it is shinning directly into your telescope.

Toupsky is the software Bresser include with the your camera for managing the camera settings. Depending how you get on with Toupsky you might consider trying Sharpcap (which is free) as it is an often mentioned astro camera controller in member's posts.

I would start with the Moon, it is quick to locate and would be the easiest object to use to learn the capture software you use. Generally for the Moon and planets you take short pieces of video as the Moon is so bright exposure length is very short. The video you could then run through Registax (also free) and process the best frames from the video and create a final image. The first time I used Registax I used this site to help me process the video with it link here. 

Smaller deep space objects (assuming at this time not doing EAA on which I know nothing) you would take single frames and the exposure length now would be longer ( as long as sensible before noise is too great, start at 5 seconds and see what the image looks like) as you need more light to be captured. You would take many frames and then stack them which improves signal to noise, you could use Deep Sky Stacker (free).

Have fun experimenting.

 

 

 

 

[vlaiv]

4 hours ago, Samantha said:

Thank you for getting back to me. Basically if i understand it right then when i take either photos or do recording if i put the gain settings on something like 30% for example that would make the image bright enough on both recording and photographing with it ?

There is no real distinction between video and photograph as far as sensor goes - video is just fast sequence of individual photographs put together. For that reason we can talk only about single photographs or what is sometimes called exposure.

Maybe best way to explain actual use of gain is via analogy and example. What I'm about to say is related to single exposure or video feed, it does not relate to advanced techniques used for producing an image from telescope. It is best if you take things slowly and don't dive into all complexity at once - most people get overwhelmed by it.

Imagine you have a water tap, and a bucket. You can open up tap and water will flow and it will take some time to fill the bucket. If flow is stronger it will take less time to fill the bucket. If bucket is larger it will take more time to fill it. There is relationship between strength of flow, size of bucket and time it takes to fill it up (or fill it 3/4 or half of it).

Strength of flow in above analogy is amount of light from target - not all targets have same brightness. Some stars are brighter than others - same is true for nebulae, clusters and galaxies.

Size of bucket is analogy for gain. Low gain is large bucket, high gain is small bucket.

Filling time in this simple analogy is exposure time (how much it takes to make a single image).

For image to be bright on screen, you need to "fill the bucket". If target is not bright in single exposure, you can do two things - either use "smaller bucket" (that will fill faster) - increased gain, or take more time to fill it up - longer exposure. If target is bright enough you can use short exposure and larger bucket.

For simplicity - leave gain at something like 30% - and try to take image. If you can't see target, first try increasing exposure length - it is not uncommon to have exposures that last for dozen of seconds. If you still can't see the target in long exposure - then raise the gain.

Hope above makes sense.

4 hours ago, Samantha said:

The other thing i have is where i live i got problems of street lights and a neighbour on other side of our street which is a diagonal house is there a way i can even though i got no dew shield to take the light out or just use my telescope cap cover and take one cap off still can do photography and recording?

Light pollution is common problem for many people enjoying this hobby. Don't be tempted to put cover on the scope to stop surrounding light getting in. It will prevent some of surrounding light from getting in but it will also prevent light that you want to get - that from your target, from getting in the scope - and net result will be worse image.

4 hours ago, Samantha said:

Because when i got when neighbour light come on due to people not only walking by but vehicles in our street triggering it will that cause same as led streetlights effect the imaging mode to point i still have to go brighter again or go darker down to about 20% to cut out that excess light? This is the problem where i live there is way too might light pollution and i only have one place i can go to do not only observing etc but is the only dark sky recognised place at the moment which makes it difficult trying to find right balance of taking out any unwanted lights aswell. 

Using camera is rather nice way to still be able to "observe" (or rather record / look on your computer screen) astronomy targets. This is because light "adds" so your camera will record sum of light coming from light pollution and light coming from target.

Way to deal with light pollution in this case is to "subtract" it from the final image. Light pollution is relatively uniform and it will just be uniform signal in your image. There is something called "black point" in the image that you can often adjust - either in your capture application or in image processing application. By adjusting this black point, you are in fact subtracting that uniform light pollution glow.

Light pollution will hurt your image in other ways - so it's best to have as minimal light pollution as possible, but understanding of that is also a bit advanced and best left for later once you master basics.

Try to see if your capture application has options for what is usually called Histogram manipulation, or black point. Adjusting those will let you see the target regardless of any light pollution that might get into the scope.