Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
Congrats on your new camera. I look forward to your review of it.
Greg.
|
I have had a good initial session with the ASI294MC, especially considering I have no experience with Sharpcap, other than using the polar alignment feature in the field a few times. I loaded the camera driver from the ZWO website and it just worked. The Sharpcap settings will need some work, but I found a pdf file on the Net that had some good suggestions. For targets, I started easy with Orion, Tarantula, and Eta C, all of which fairly quickly stacked a useful view. I was running with the reducer, so at f6,8, and the field looked good, stars round to the edges. Back spacing on the reducer is 55mm, so i used a 37,5mm set of 48mm extension, the rest of the distance is internal to the camera sensor. . I manually focused but I think using the focus assistance of Sharpcap will make things a bit easier. It is nice to just sit in my chair and let the mount and scope do their thing, without having to contort my body to get to the EP.
No noticeable noise in the image, I left the gain at 200 which is where the lowest noise kicks in. Worked fine without cooling it seems. No drift showing up on frame alignment stats, but didn't really expect much with my pier polar alignment.
Just the one usb3 cable from the camera to the laptop, but I did use my powered usb3 extension as well just to be safe and provide more length. Pretty simple setup really. I didn't bother saving any images, but maybe Sharpcap is saving them somewhere, I don't know. Real time viewing, or stacked viewing, is fine enough for me. Next time i will have a go at some targets of lesser magnitude.
Photos attached of the complete rig.