On Thu, Aug 22, 2024 at 02:13 AM, Kevin Cummins wrote:
OK, please help me learn.
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I've been shooting film and digital for years but this is a whole new game for me. I never got serious with my used ST2000XM years ago. I was in South Carolina and was still shooting gas hypered film. OK, I'm old...
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When I took this dark, I used the "take photo" option in TSX. It showed up in TSX FITS viewer as a pile of crap, so to speak. Small and looked like an old failing CRT with a bad signal. So that has been my reference in my communications here.
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I just opened it up in Pixinsight out of curiosity, and it's completely black with the exception of about 40 pixels scattered about. Is that what you are seeing as well?
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Next, what is the proper cooling to set? Should it be maxed out?
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I can give the camera time to cool properly and take another dark from the office here. We can see if it's cooling.
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All info and advice welcome. I don't know crap about this.
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Thanks.
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Kevin
It's a big leaning curve Kevin and will take some time to master.
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The camera can only cool in ideal conditions to -40c below ambient but you should never run a cooled camera at the maximum cooling because the temperature regulation needs some headroom to move in and when you come to calibrate your images you need to have the lights, darks, flats and bias frames all taken at the same temperature.
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You won't achieve that if the camera is set to maximum cooling and your images at the start of the session were taken at -5c and the ones at the end of the session reach -20c, for example.
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Set the camera temperature according to the expected ambient conditions and select the targets to suit, saving those targets that would benefit from long exposures at deep cooling for the time of year, or time of night, when the ambient temperatures are low and the camera can deliver.
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I looked at your dark frame in PIxInsight and for the temperature it looked ok to me.
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TheSky's image viewer is a bit too aggressive I found, when I last used it, but there are a number of stretch options if I remember right and you have to select the right stretch option for the target, Its more of a quick check tool and not really a tool for assessing image quality IMO, PixInsight is the ideal tool for that.
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Will.
WILL B