dkerber

My imaging camera is a T3i just like yours, and it works perfectly. I've been using it all winter, whenever I have a clear night (not that often, unfortunately).

A 2-second exposure at a focal length of 300mm on a crop sensor is pretty much guaranteed to get star trailing even if your tripod is as stable as a rock. Any wobbling in your tripd would just add to it.

Looking at the flat itself, I didn't see anything noticeable, but my first guess would be that the flat panel isn't as flat as it should be. I would also suggest lengthening the exposure, as was suggested above. I have had the best results putting the histogram peak near the middle of the range, and I use the same imaging camera as the OP does (T3i/600D).

Well, maybe by the time I retire in a few years, I'll have my head around VB.NET well enough to tackle that project myself (just made a post about that over on the ASCOM dev group). Of course, I'll need to learn the Canon SDK at the same time... Always something new to learn!

Hi, Rick, a In order: I did not realize that the Canon SDK only allowed focus control in LiveView; that does make it more difficult, though you could still work around it by taking an image, then switching to live view, moving the focus position, drop back out of LV, shoot another image, and repeat the cycle as needed. In addition, there is no hard reason that you would need to construct a V-curve for autofocus, and in fact Voyager, which does a much better job focusing than SGP does, does not. Instead, it does a statistical curve fit, but not even that is absolutely required. You

I like to use my Canon lenses as wide field APO lenses, but unless I'm shooting the moon, nothing is bright enough for the Canon's autofocus to work. If BYE could expose an ASCOM focuser interface, it could act as a communications translator between the various astronomical autofocus routines out there, and my canon camera with canon lenses. The 3rd party AF apps work fine when my canon body is connected to a telescope focuser, but there is nothing that lets me do AF when I'm using my Canon lenses on the same body... Thanks for listening!

If I do at all, it's either Voyager or SGP, depending on the situation. I like SGP, but its AF routine isn't as robust in poor seeing as Voyager's is. However, often I don't plate solve and center; I'll just slew there from CPWI and shoot enough short frames in BYE with manual position adjustments to get the composition I want, then (sometimes) start guiding and then shooting. For objects that don't need long exposures like M42 or M31, I typically don't guide.

So it's now a single takepicture call for each frame? And re-send the command for each additional frame? If that interpretation is correct, I can handle that. Thanks! Dave

I am doing some experimenting with the BYE API, and am having issues with the 'exposures:' parameter of the takepicture command. I am sending (extracted from my application log): takepicture target:M13 duration:60 iso:800 imagetype:0 quality:raw exposures:2 All the parameters appear to work except the expsoures parameter. I get the correct duration, ISO and image type, but only 1 exposure. This is true even when I change the order of parameters on the command line. Any suggestions? I couldn't find the log file to attache it; if you tell me where that lives, I'll send it if you t

Do you really need 5m? Will 2 or 3 work? You'll work a lot more reliably when you use the shortest cable that will reach. It's also VERY worth it to buy higher-quality (I.E. not from Amazon) cable. Last winter, I went through several cables (the cold seemed to kill them) until I spent $20 on a good one, which has been working for nearly a year with no issues at all.

Another option would be to start the laptop and BYE at home and let it validate the key, then put it in Sleep or Hibernate mode while you travel to your dark sky site. As long as you don't have to shutdown BYE during your session, you should be good to go.

This is a relatively minor display enhancement request. Currently, during the pause time countdown between frames, there is nothing that shows which frame number it is on; there is one during the exposure countdown. I would like to see one during the pause countdown as well. My use case is that I typically add a pause time equal to the expose time between my dark frames to let the sensor cool down. Currently I have to wait until the exposure starts to tell what frame I'm on when I come back to it. Ideally, it would show something like "Pause 6 of 10" and the seconds counting down, just li

It does work! The one I had tried earlier was giving full control to the icon, which didn't help. Changing the permissions on the install directory as listed above did the trick!

Thanks for the suggestion, but it didn't help. Exactly the same symptoms, even with full control permissions to both the startup link, and the directory itself.

Well, that sucks! The more M$ tries to make things simpler, the harder it gets...