Astroberry/EOS 600D Mirror Lock

[Sabalias]

Hi everyone,

Last night I had to fetch my son from a party in the wee hours; fortunately this coincided with some rare clear skies so I set up my rig (some new stuff included). Polar alignment was fine, two-star alignment was good and so the mount was operating well. Unfortunately, due to user error (I didn’t realise that my camera mirror lock up feature was enabled) and a technical glitch (Astroberry stopped communicating) I wasn’t able to get much else done. This morning I reinstalled Astroberry and sorted the camera settings - all good. Can anyone advise me how to enable a mirror lock through kstars on my 600D please?  I have found the option in the software and added it to the planned session but I can’t see any exposure delay options. 

Hope all that makes sense

Stu

[Alien 13]

To add mirror lock up into any timer sequence jut use the camera "self timer" function, think it is 5 or 10 seconds.

Alan

[Sabalias]

17 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

To add mirror lock up into any timer sequence jut use the camera "self timer" function, think it is 5 or 10 seconds.

Alan

Thanks Alan. Is that option in kstars or built in to the camera?

Stu

[Alien 13]

1 hour ago, Sabalias said:

Thanks Alan. Is that option in kstars or built in to the camera?

Stu

Its on the camera itself, a useful way of getting a single trigger pulse from the shutter button/intervalometer/other to perform the lock up and open the shutter after a pre determined delay..

Alan

[david_taurus83]

I don't think it works in Kstars. I've had issues in NINA and Kstars if I try to enable the MLU function on my 6D.

[Sabalias]

3 hours ago, Alien 13 said:

Its on the camera itself, a useful way of getting a single trigger pulse from the shutter button/intervalometer/other to perform the lock up and open the shutter after a pre determined delay..

Alan

Thanks for the pointer Alan, works like a charm. In case anyone else has got a similar problem, you can solve it by setting the self timer on the camera to 2 seconds and kstars will still trigger the photograph but the first two seconds will be overridden by the camera parking the mirror. So if you program a 60 second exposure, with a two second self timer then the exposure will actually be 58 seconds. For this to work, you will also need to enable the mirror lock function on the camera and include a gap between exposures  

Stu

Edited July 11, 2021 by Sabalias

[Alien 13]

10 minutes ago, Sabalias said:

Thanks for the pointer Alan, works like a charm. In case anyone else has got a similar problem, you can solve it by setting the self timer on the camera to 2 seconds and kstars will still trigger the photograph but the first two seconds will be overridden by the camera parking the mirror. So if you program a 60 second exposure, with a two second self timer then the exposure will actually be 58 seconds. You will also need to include a program for a few seconds space between exposures I think. 
 

Stu

The two second delay is handy anyway to allow for any mirror slap vibrations to settle down, you are correct in the need for a few seconds between exposures so that and data can be written to the SD card or transferred over USB, I usually leave 10 seconds but I am always cautious.. 

If the camera has other timer/intervalometer functions built in they too can sometimes be included in a sequence...

Alan

Edited July 11, 2021 by Alien 13