Basic settings to be worked out now.

[davy999]

Hi

My kit is listed below, nexstar - titan etc.. I had my first night of imaging last night and got some images of M15 and of other various random areas of space so thought I would just ramble on a little about how I got on as a complete novice.

The first diffuculty I have is that trying to get the object close enough to the centre to be able to see it when the camera is inserted, I notice that on fitting the camera its easy to cause the object to move away from the image but I am sure in time with some practice and a steadier hand this can be improved somewhat.

Trying to focus I see is quite difficult, even with my temporary fix for dual focus (carboard disk pushed over the current focusing know) but I did find that as time went on this got better, but I had the pc about 8 feet away from the scope and I would move focus go to lappy move focus check lappy.. certainly I need the lappy close enough to clearly see the focusing adjustments straight away rather than adjust move adjust move, schoolboy error I know but oh well, it was my first night with cam!.

I was using artemis capture and I did find it a very good bit of software to use, I dont know if it's a package for the more accomplished AP but for an absolute beginner like me it was fairly easy to use. Mind you saying that I did have the "save automatically" option checked and was looping the images, oh dear.. took me ages to realise that this was saving the live feed that I thought was just a preview. Oh well, I have about 1000 images of various bits of space some sort of in focus, some definelty not, some black, some almost white but generally at least i know now what not to do.

It was a little strange at first that once aligned with an object it would drift on the screen for a while until it had "settled down" I am assuming that this is because of backlash and maybe periodic errors in the mount but towards the end of the session this was much improved.

Well, biggest problem I have is getting a balance right of exposure length and something called "log" changing these helped to make the image much more clearer on screen, but then I know the image you see on screen isnt an accurate representation of the image you end up loading into your post processing programs.

Loaded some images into "Dawn" the beta program that came with the camera and am just learning how to use this so that should I manage to get some half decent images I will have a bit of a structured plan to process them (well I can hope anyway)

Time is the biggest problem at the moment due to it not really being dark enough to start imaging until midnight but after tomorrow things start moving in our favour so I will get more time to experiment and get some idea of what sort of settings to start with when imaging certain objects. Last night was just sort of fiddling with sliders and various settings and whilst the results were terrible I enjoyed the process, all I need to do now is to understand what the heck I am doing when I change certain settings in the capture process. I am not worried too much yet about post processing as you can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear! I have an image on my desktop that truly shows this!

More to follow when I have something I dare show you

[kookoo_gr]

in order to focus eventually u will have to use an electric focuser. before u buy one there is one trick i used when i started imaging. find a bright star e.g. vega center with your imaging camera and get a good focus as possible. when u get the best possible focus mark the focus point of the focuser with a marker. because i image with a newt its easy for me to mark at the focuser tube for u it might be a bit trickier. i also use the atik 16ic camera and i stopped using the artemis capture software because it has limited functions and started using nebulosity 2. because i forgot how artemis works when i frame and focus my target i usually use an exposure of 1-2sec and the max binning the camera can provide, also use auto white balance (in nebulosity its automatic and i think its 2x2, i also think there is a focus option at the artemis software) i would recommend to use the nebulosity 2 software available at stark labs page. u can download a trial version that will add a watermark at your images i think. try it out and if it suits u can buy a license.

when u save the images they are b/w fits files and the artemis rgb conversion program was difficult for me to grasp and so i ended up using the nebulosity because u can convert the raw image into colour much easier. in order to get long exposure times for imaging u should use a second telescope as a guiding telescope along with a second camera as a guiding camera and use the phd software. the spc900 is a good starting camera but u might find difficult to find a guiding star

hope it helps