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Re: Purging a QSI
Hi Nicola.
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Amazon is not really the right place for a specialist product such as gas supplies, too little technical information on the products they sell and virtually no traceability and regulatory certifications provided.
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Depending where you¡¯re based you might be better going to local welding equipment supplier, which will probably be less expensive too.
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I bought my pure Argon, in a 2.2 Litre disposable cylinder, plus a gas regulator for disposable cylinders, from a UK based welding equipment supplier "The Welding Superstore" with only a length of 4mm O.D. pneumatic air hose bought from Amazon:
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If you must use Amazon then the links below show similar products but with insufficient information provided to be sure that these will be fully compatible, vis-¨¤-vis, regulator fitting to match the cylinder threads and valve type, purity of the gas and whether or not the gas cylinder meets U.K. safety regulations etc.
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Amazon sell slightly less expensive kits that include the Argon gas cylinder, regulator and hose, but only in 60 Litre disposable cylinder sizes, which is much too large and dangerous to have in a domestic situation, even though Argon gas is inert the cylinders can explode if overheated or dropped. A single small 2.2 Litre cylinder will long outlast your QSI camera.
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Lastly, if buying your own Argon gas supplies make sure that you are buying pure Argon (100%) and not Argon/CO2 mixture, many of the gas cylinders sold on Amazon as "Argon" are actually Argon/CO2 mixtures but incorrectly labelled or described.
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HTH
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Will. |
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Re: Purging a QSI
Hello All, may anyone point me to the right Argon dispenser product on Amazon? Thanks Nicola Il giorno lun 20 nov 2023 alle ore 23:36 Steve Richards <steve@...> ha scritto: Hi William, --
Nicola Sky Monsters - |
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Re: NGC 6946 image
¿ªÔÆÌåÓýHi Bruce,
What a superb rendition of this eye-catching galaxy you have produced.
Best regards,
Geof
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of bw <bw_msg01@...>
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2024 4:43:47 AM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [QSI-CCD] NGC 6946 image ?
Well, the New Mexico monsoons ended and here's an image of NGC 6946, the "fireworks" galaxy, a face-on spiral galaxy in Cepheus. ?Despite having a stellar population of only about 1/2 that of our Milky Way, it has a high rate of new star formation and
is classed as an active starburst galaxy. ?The "fireworks" sobriquet stems from its production of 10 observed supernovae in the past century, roughly 10x as many as that of the Milky Way. ?Various "peculiar" objects associated with the galaxy have attracted
the attention of astronomers over the years, and two of them can be seen in this image. ?"Hodge's object" is the name given to the bright blue object at the 11:00 position and the "red ellipse" appears at the end of the long spiral arm at the 1:00 position.
?Hodge's object has recently been conjectured to be an interacting dwarf galaxy superimposed on the disk of NGC 6946, and the red ellipse may be some kind of super bubble or very large supernova remnant - it is huge by any standard.? This rendition intentionally
corrected for the reddening of the galaxy from dust in our galaxy - with an "as-seen" color balance, the colors in the spiral arms are very subdued.
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Data capture occurred over a 3-night period in September for a total LRGB integration of 18.3 hours.
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Re: QSI 700 series cameras in stock and available now.
On Wed, Sep 11, 2024 at 11:27 AM, ZackD wrote:
The 455 chips are manufactured with 2 dies so you are seeing the evidence of that when you push the stretch. It will calibrate out with proper calibration files.? Thanks for the confirmation. I suspected that might be the case, but didn't want to assert anything when Google was being useless trying to confirm it. I'm honestly somewhat impressed at how well the output is matched between the two halves. I didn't think the variability was quite low enough they could get away with this just yet.?
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The reason I went with the QSI was somewhat on impulse. I was trying to decide between QHY and Moravian, and was chatting with the owner of Cloud Break about it. He mentioned that QSI was coming out with an IMX455, which was going to be considerably cheaper than Moravian, and with the dealer being in driving distance, I at least had someone nearby to who would be willing to try to help if there were problems.
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So far, I'm pretty happy with the camera. The biggest concern to me is the poor behavior of the driver when there are USB communication issues (returning the same frame endlessly is worse than erroring out). Better integration with NINA is I think the biggest feature ask I have, and it looks doable with the existing SDK. ?
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Re: QSI 700 series cameras in stock and available now.
It's a week late, but I finally got some time to do some rough processing of the first light tests. A couple caveats with this data though. This was the first capture session with a new Mini-PC which hit the usual first session glitches. So tracking isn't where I normally like it, and only got about an hour of luminance data before I got clouded out in light polluted skies. I am also aware that I need to dial in the spacing on my flattener, although I am not even sure this scope/flattener combo can do full frame. I need to experiment more.
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I've made a few files available on Dropbox and the final uncropped result on Astrobin. The integrated dark frame (20 180s darks), a single dark frame, and the integrated flat I used for the luminance data, along with the final JPEG out of Affinity Photo. The reason I included the flat is that there's a clear "seam" that shows up when you aggressively stretch the flat, right down the middle of the sensor. It looks like there's something about the sensor design that produces this? Did Sony split some electronics up as pixel density increased on these large sensors? I'm not even sure it's prominent enough to worry about, but flats should calibrate it out regardless.
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Astrobin:
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Dropbox:
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Re: QSI 700 series cameras in stock and available now.
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The Eagle 2.1mm power cable has a very tight fit to the 760's power plugin.? It works but I was worrying that I was going to bend the center shaft.? Definitely don't have to worry about a power cable without the locking screw falling out. The power cable that comes with the 760 is a 2.5mm ID, not sure how you got a 2.1mm ID to fit?
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Getting back to this, I find it interesting that:
A) The QSI Demo app doesn't use ASCOM for the driver. B) The latest Windows/Linux SDKs from Aug 5th appear to include the same library that the demo app uses.
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Such a thing?seems doable with the SDK that was provided this month, but I haven't tried to write anything against it to confirm that.?
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I'll probably have some first light stuff together this weekend. |
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Re: QSI 700 series cameras in stock and available now.
I've only seen the results from a couple users of pre-production units on AstroBin so far, yes. At least in terms of noise, there's only one curiosity in the 5 min dark I started with, where there's a little elevated ADUs (10-15) up against the edge. But much like the dark current, this is a very quiet sensor and these slightly elevated ADUs should correct out cleanly. Medium gain puts the noise floor at around 400 ADU, and the mean of the whole dark is 406 at 5 minutes (and a bit lower at 3min). I'm honestly impressed just how much Sony has kept noise down as they've shrunk the pixels on their sensors, as this is doing just as well as my 168C with larger pixels.
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This is my first mono camera, so I'm still working through the changes to my process with NINA, as well as a reinstall of NINA and APCC on a new mini PC. I do want to get this out under the stars this week if at all possible though, so I do want to share some results once I've had the chance to capture something more than just flats and darks.?
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Re: QSI 700 series cameras in stock and available now.
I received my 760 from Cloud Break yesterday, coming from a QHY168C as my OSC camera. I had a couple initial bits of constructive criticism from my indoor tests last night due to clouds.?
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1) Screws and washers for locking down the filters came in an envelope, and the washers had mostly escaped into the included case during shipping to Cloud Break. With these being this small, a resealable plastic bag should really be included. Other than that, I like the included hard case, and appreciate there is space for the OAG down the road.
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2) When using the ASCOM driver with NINA 3.x, I noticed that if I cancel an exposure, the camera remains busy until the exposure completes, as if the camera itself is still exposing. If you accidentally set a 5-min exposure to loop when you didn't mean to, that can be rather annoying as you have to power cycle the whole camera in order to skip the wait and reset everything. I need to double-check if this also reproduces in the provided QSI demo app, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's specific to the ASCOM side of the driver.?
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3) My existing setup is a Pegasus Power Box Advance, fed via the internal USB cable on a Mach 2. The QSI doesn't seem to like being connected to the USB3 ports on the Power Box. I'm not counting this as a mark against the QSI, as my QHY 168C also misbehaves in this configuration. However, it's what the QSI does when it misbehaves that is a concern. You'll get the first few frames just fine, but it will fail at some point and when that happens it will just continue to return the last good frame over and over again. I was able to reproduce this with the QSI demo app as well. This behavior continues until the camera is power cycled. This can be disastrous when doing an automated capture session, as you'll just get a bunch of identical frames, but have no idea that the camera had hit a failure unless you are checking manually or trying to figure out why your stacked images are noisier than they should be. I did notice that the "download" took ~4 times longer when the bug was triggered than normally.
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4) Small fans means a higher pitched whine when the camera is on. This is a bit of a nit, but I generally find the QHY fan noise less objectionable.
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That said, the filter wheel behavior so far is consistent and repeatable, so doing some test flats indoors worked pretty well. Cooling is fine for our rather mild climate, and was using 35% power to maintain ~20C below ambient. I wasn't seeing any leaks from the Astronomik 50mm filters I'm using. Downloading over USB3 is nice and quick. In terms of the basics, there's nothing obviously wrong. I'll be happy if the driver bugs can be fixed, and can help provide logs/etc so long as I'm told how to capture them.
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When using the ASCOM driver with NINA, you can set the gain from NINA which is good. It is backwards from what I'm used to though. 0 is high gain, 1 is medium gain, and 2 is low gain. Just be aware.?
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I'm going to see if I can dial in my field flattener and get a reasonable flat field out of my TMB92SS using the full frame sensor when I get some time this week under clear skies. Vignetting was about 16% in the worst corners but I did notice a clear offset in the flats so it could possibly get a bit better. Need to see where in the optical train the offset is coming from.
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WILL B
Pico de Paperis
Geof Lewis
@Nycturne