new camera purchase.

[jayconnor]

Hello iceinspacians.

Yesterday my new ZWO ASI 290MC camera arrived. An excited little chappy i was. Now i installed all the drivers and sharpcap also. I got a little action in before was clouded over.

Could anyone point me in the direction of some solid tutorials for
Focusing/imaging/videoing?

Had a little trouble trying to focus it as im so used to my DSLR live view that give you instant live view but it seemed to be delayed on my laptop.

Any help advice would be greatly appreciated as it seems it'll be cloudy all weekend :( so ill do some reading up and studying

Also i have a tele vue X2.5 that may be of assistance when using this camera also.

Kind Regards, Jay

[Tulloch]

Hi Jay, thanks for that, now you have a new camera you have guaranteed we will have clouds here in Melbourne for at least a week! :rofl:

But seriously, I assume that since you have an ASI290MC you will be looking at planetary imaging (and now is the best time to do it). If you haven't already watched these videos, I would highly recommend them.
http://planetaryimagingtutorials.com/

I use FireCapture with my ASI224MC and can highly recommend it (there is a tutorial video included in the link above), I assume a BT200 F/5 is a 200mm Newtonian F/5, so with the 290MC you will want to image the planets at about f/15 (so the 2.5x Barlow should work well).

Focusing is hard, and takes a bit of getting used to - I myself use a piece of pipe foam insulation over the focus knob and one of my wife's long hair clips attached to it to give me (almost) vibration free manual focusing.

Hope this helps,

Andrew

[jayconnor]

Thanks Andrew. You are right its been cloudy since this post haha
Is there options to help you focus in firecap that makes it easier?

[Tulloch]

No worries. Torsten (creator of FC) has indicated that he will implement a focus aid in his next version, but it hasn't been released yet.

So for the moment, with Jupiter I tend to focus on one of its moons, trying to get it as small and tight as possible, then slew back to the planet. For Saturn I focus on the Cassini Division, to get that as sharp as I can.

A link to a photo of my setup is below.
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/707728-focuser-or-not-focuser/?p=10194236

Andrew

[Tulloch]

Actually, it looks like Wednesday night / Thursday morning could be good :question:

[jayconnor]

fingers toes knees body EVERYTHING crossed haha