Focusing

prevalain

Hello there. I have a Lunt 50ST/350 solar telescope and I get a sharp image of the Sun in my BF 600 viewer. When I get the eyepiece out and mount my ASI 462MC camera on it, I can no longer get in focus using SharpCap . I'm wondering if I should try using another app or whether I'm having issues finding the focal length of the camera. Can anybody help. Thank you

w7ay

prevalain When I get the eyepiece out and mount my ASI 462MC camera on it, I can no longer get in focus using SharpCap

That simply means that your camera is not parfocal with your eyepiece. You need to refocus the telescope after replacing the eyepiece with a camera.

I see that you are posting to the ASIAIR forum -- in which case, you can try using the Video mode of the ASIAIR to achieve focus.

Remember that focusing with a camera requires much more precision than focusing visually, since your eye muscle is part of the "focusing train" and the brain adapts to small misfocus. The camera has no such adaptation and the sensor needs to be perfectly placed at the focal point of the optics.

Focusing takes a little patience, but if you have an electronic focuser on your telescope, you can at least do the focusing indoors with ASIAIR, away from the heat and brightness of the Sun.

Chen

prevalain

Thank you for your answer. Reading through both my camera and telescope owner manuals, I found some find print at the bottom of my telescope owner manual: "It will reach focus with some CCDs and webcams when you remove the eyepiece-holder from the blocking-filter diagonal". I'll be trying that tomorrow. My telescope has a helicoidal focuser so I can't mount an EAF device on it. I'll c ome back here to telle yopu if this worked or not. It can be a pretty easy solution if this works.