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Old 23-06-2012, 11:36 AM
Karls48 (Karl)
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Karls48 is offline
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Sydney
Posts: 753
Well, since I got my Orion Starshoot G3 camera back I have spend twelve nights imagining with it. Or, more correctly – setting it up for best results. That included almost two nights building Darks library for wide range of temperatures. So far – no problems with cooling, but I’m using old 17 AH battery that charges only to 13.2V to power the camera cooling. I’m scared to use 13.8V-regulated PS in case the camera would fail again.
I’m using this camera with ASCOM driver and Maxim DL
With 150mm F5 refractor camera does not perform well on exposures shorter then 40 seconds, displaying random horizontal lines on most of images (vertical on my images as I automatically rotate all my images with North up) unless there is saturated bright star in the field of view.
On longer exposures 60 to 120 sec the stars of 10 mag and up get saturated. The lines occur in some images as well.. I tried to reduce gain to 0.4e per ADU but that did not work out well. So I stopped aperture of my scope to F 6.8. That gives me with 90 sec exposure range of about 8.5 to 13 mag stars to measure.
Compare to Meade DSI2, raw instrument magnitudes were closer to standard magnitudes on DSI2 then on Orion G3.
ASCOM driver got some bugs, occasionally the camera stops responding and error message pops up. Disconnecting camera (in software) and reconnecting will resume normal operation. Also selecting overscan in ASCOM driver seems to reduce occurrences of white lines in the images.
Big plus for this camera is its price, well depth and sealed CCD sensor. No dust or fogging of sensor, even on –5 deg.
I think that G3 is better suited to scopes at around F8 then F5.

LU Vel 90sec exposure 10Deg C and stack of 24 images
4 of 24 images got white lines in random position
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