CMOS Cameras - Stacking many very short exposures
Hello!
I have few questions about methods, how it would be possible to control external programs from ACP. My goal is following: I want to use a CMOS camera with very short exposure times to do photometric measurements of bright stars. While it it definitely possible from camera side, one can not beat the Nature - 100 millisecond exposure through 8 cm telescope gives awful scincillation noise. Solution is "easy" - one just has to stack many frames. Effective exposure time of ~50 seconds is already getting there. But for that, 500 0.1-second frames must be stacked. When each one of them is 40 MB in size (20 Mpix cameras...)... well, probably there is no need to explain more.
Unfortunately, MaximDL is not helping here at the moment. However, there are other programs for that. I'm thinking currently about SharpCap Pro (https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/...ro/sharpcappro), that allows to do live stacking (buffering high-framerate images into RAM, doing preprocessing on the fly, stacking on fly), is remotely controllable/scriptable, and can save stacked output as FITS file.
Is there any good methods how to use an external capture program from ACP using e.g. scripts? Does ACP support directly Python scripts? Can such scripts be used from e.g. Scheduler?
With best wishes,
Tõnis
Fast Downloads and OH in Scheduler/ACP
Hello
I was checking some short images exposures of 10 seconds or so, and found that in a time series with no filter change, that I could only get an image every 20 seconds, implying that there was 10 seconds of overhead for each image As we use shorter exposures with these CMOS cameras, this overhead will limit the thruput. Are there things/options to turn off functions that can reduce this overhead. I am using an L500 PW mount, so for instance it is not necessary to plate solve each image. Can you think of other things? When I use the Continuous mode in Maxim, it takes about 1 second between images, and its displaying them. I am using the Kepler 400 camera.
Thanks in advance for any advice that you can give
Gary