I have the Star Analyser grating so I'll be able to compare that sensitivity on a planet The raw spectrum will be affected by the spectral response of the CCD. DMK and Saturn below show the green sensitivity peak while Saturn isn't green.
For me several things are important. Well depth, pixel size, frame rates at native size and noise levels. I am largely unconcerned with weight as the Skynyx is probably the heaviest camera getting around and that barely even impacts on the mount.
I also wonder about noise and heat with this camera given its size. Would the heat build and create noise? (this is a rhetorical question; no need to answer as we will know soon enough) For me having 12 bit or more and low noise is going to make a far greater impact in good seeing.
I look forward to seeing your results and we will no doubt talk about this later.
Paul, the camera has the potential to run hot, but outside on the scope this morning it was only warm to the touch in ambient temps of about 9C.
It got a lot hotter inside the house on the test bench yesterday.
But the results on the scope for temperature are about the same as the dragonfly2, I guess the smaller size of the flea3 makes it more noticeable. Might be an advantage though - we can get heavy dew and ice here esp. in winter and at least that might be kept away from the sensor by the warm running temp.
Warm CCD shouldn't be a problem if you are imaging planets but for longer exposures it may add some additional noise. DMK21 at 11,5 sec needs a good dark (and I was imaging 81P comet at 11,5 sec exposures). For long exposures (planetary nebula, comet hunting?) sticking a peltier unit on the housing shouldn't be a problem (peltier, radiator, fan and more cabels ) For shorter nice cooper radiator and some silicon termoconducting glue should help if needed
As you know Anthony we have spoken about the possible issue of noise generated from the heat of these camera's despite the short sub exposures. I am still wondering if cooling these cameras will dramatically improve the performance and increase signal further. I cannot see why not and once I get my new camera I will be experimenting on the skynyx to see if there are any possibilities.
Yes the reduction of ice and dew on the unit is necessary of course but with a small peltier on top of it this would happen anyway. Food for thought. I can feel an experiment coming on.
Ok, I've heard back from PGR about something I noticed on the Flea3, I didn't want to say too much before checking with them in case this interesting behaviour was going to somehow "go away" in future, but they seem happy enough with it.
The Flea3 officially supports gain values from -2db to 24db, *but* this can be easily bypassed and gain values up to 33.2db are possible. The image is amazingly bright at 33.2db and the background noise is still very low. This is a killer feature of the camera, but you need software that will know how to access this extra gain or else you'll see a limit of 24db.
Coriander under Linux supports the over-gain values as-is, and for Windows users I've emailed Torsten about adding support into Firecapture for it.
The way to access the exctra gain is very easy really - the camera control registers have two ways to set the gain, either a slider value from 0 to 762 that is mapped onto gain values between -2db and 24db, or using the "absolute value" registers where you write the actual gain value requested as a floating point number.
In the second case, using the absolute value register for gain its possible to input values up to 33.2 and the camera responds accordingly :-)
With the extra gain headroom this camera is far and away the best of any cameras that I've tested.
In fact these gain values are pretty meaningless for trying to compare between cameras. For each camera this gain value is relative to the reference voltage fed to the a/d converter, but this reference is set wherever the designers want it, so 33db on one camera is not going to be the same as 33db on another camera.
I know you probably are aware of this already Emil, but maybe others here are looking at the gain numbers as something that can be used to compare between cams, but that's not right :-)
Not a very scientific method, but once you have played around with a icx618 camera, you just know it is just really good. Simply comparing the final results will give a good indication of what it can do. In my case the only thing that changed was the ccd. And when the image was more than twice as bright in red, and even more in IR without an apparent increase in noise, I knew it was a keeper. I pretty much was convinced already by looking at Torsten Edelmans initial webcam modification.
pff.. it's cold outside, I shouldn't type that much. Currently imaging a Tethys transit, but Saturn is only 30 degrees above the horizon now
Bird:
I just got my Flea3 and so far I have managed to install the Firewire 1394b card and power up the camera. It shows up as a generic 1394 camera and I can take still images using the Windows utility, however, FlyCapture does not recognize that I have a camera, and when I try to associate any of the drivers in the driver folder they provided, I am told by Windows XP that they don't contain any information pertaining to my attached camera. Either I screwed up something in the software installation process, or else PGR does not include support for the new camera in their standard software package.
I notice that you have been using a Dragonfly2, and also that you use "Coriander" for capture. I wonder if it uses the same driver as your older camera? Maybe Coriander is just a smarter program than FlyCapture. Did you even try to run the camera with FlyCapture?
Clif, New Jersey, USA
Cliff, I guess you have the latest PGR software package off their website - 2.0.15? That's what I installed under Windows and it works fine, flycap2 detects the flea3 ok.
If you can't get that to work then maybe lodge a support request with PGR, they are pretty good at helping out.
If you want to use Windows for imaging then you can use FireCapture to run the camera from Torsten Edelmann, it has support for the Flea3.
Coriander is a Linux application, I'd recommend that as much better than Windows if you want to give it a go :-)
Bird:
The disk came only with the older version, and for some reason, when I registered on the PG site, I was only cleared for documentation, not programs. They fixed that, and I downloaded FlyCapture2 and installed it. It detected the camera but still did not work. Turns out that I had installed service pack 3, and there is a bug in the windows 1394 driver. Fortunately, PG sent me a little utility to downgrade the driver to the working version that was in service pack 1, and now FlyCapture2 not only detects the Flea3, but I get a beautiful live video image from it with full control of the camera settings, codec, resolution, all the good things I need to do, plus a bunch I don't need. It will send raw undebayered Y8 codec also, just what I need for Registax to crunch.
So far, so good. Then I start looking for how to tell the program that I want to record a minute of video as an AVI file using all those great camera settings, and darned if I can see any way to do it. It finally dawns on me that Point Grey did not provide a real working program, but simply an example of a program that the user could create using the C++ source that they include with the installed package. There is even a piece of code that does save out an AVI file to the computer. Great! At least it would be great if I could program in C++. I don't even have a C++ compiler.
I was dismayed and disappointed to discover this. It seems very peculiar to me for a camera seller not to provide working software for their camera. I have heard on the LucamRecorder group that Heiko will be supporting the Point Grey cameras sometime this summer.
Know anyone who could lash on the save an AVI file code onto the code for FlyCapture2 and compile it for the rest of us? Otherwise I am waiting for Heiko.
Clif
Well, I got some great help from Oscar at Point Grey support. Turns out that release 23 of the older program FlyCapture 1.8 does in fact let me save AVI files from the Flea3. The GUI for the older program is not as cool as the one provided with FlyCapture 2.0, but it does have a built in save AVI file utility and the pgrcam.inf file supplied with it has the information needed to run the Flea3. I am still learning to use it, but it looks like I may actually get to use the camera, if the sky ever clears up.
The Murphy's law corollary for astronomy has really been working overtime in NJ. It has been cloudy since the new camera arrived and has been raining for the past two days now and no clearing in sight. Well, that will give me time to learn to use the software and make an adapter for the camera. The C-mount threads on the tiny 1" cube camera are machined on the inner bore of a 1/2" long 1.09" OD tube attached to the CCD side of the cube. I made a short split sleeve of 1.25" OD aluminum tubing which fits the outside of the C-mount of the camera. It holds onto the camera by friction and grips the camera when I tighten the screw on my eyepiece holder. Should work nicely. Looks like I have a big cable coupling stuck into my focuser. Where's the camera?
I understand that later versions of the compiled FlyCapture 2.0 program will include an AVI capture utility.
Clif
Hi Clif,
I have just received a Flea3 camera and am exploring the software to capture AVI's. I use Fire Capture of Thorsten Edelmann and would appreciate some suggestions which settings you are using as far as Gain and Gamma are concerned.
You mention thet release 23 of FlyCap 1.8 has an option to capture AVI's. Where can I find this release? It could not find it on the PGR site
Thanks in advance
The raw spectrum will be affected by the spectral response of the CCD. DMK and Saturn below show the green sensitivity peak while Saturn isn't green.
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