ASIMeteorCap problem

johnpd

I thought I would try taking some Perseid shots using my ASI662 with the fisheye lens. I mounted the camera on a tripod and started ASIMeteorCap. I had to set the exposure to the max (1000ms) and gain into the 500's. The sky then appeared nice on the screen. My skies are Bortle 4. Initially I got some false positives but did catch one. As time went by I got no indication that any meteors were being picked up even though I could see some nice ones stream across the screen. I don't know what happened. I am using v1.11 of ASIStudio.

JohnD

Edit:
When I shut down, I ended up with an almost 2 hour .AVI file as it found nothing for that length of time. When I looked at the file using MS Media Player or Movies and TV, they hit an error saying the file was basically corrupt. VLC will not open ZWO ASI files at all.

Tech@ZWO

johnpd Sorry for the problem, what is the value of monitor settings?
Could you try ASIVideo stack? can it open the AVI file?

johnpd

Tech@ZWO

I had exposure set at max (1000ms), Gain at about 550, Sensitivity at 90. I saw a video for using the ASIMeteorCap where that person had the exposure set at 64ms. I don't know how he got an image. He used an ASI224MC camera in his demo. I would not think that there is such a difference in cameras. I loaded the almost 2 hour image into ASIVideoStack. It was able to stack it. I have attached the image. It shows field rotation as expected as the camera is set on a tripod. I used v1.10.3 of ASIVideoStack for this.

JohnD

Tech@ZWO

johnpd I think 1000ms may be too long for ASIMeteorCap, hard to reach the capture requirement. Short exp may be better.

I also conveyed to our devs, we will optimize this as soon as possible.

johnpd

Tech@ZWO

The problem is that in order to see the sky, I need to expose that long plus push the gain way up. I don't understand why. Thanks for having the devs look into this.

JohnD

BvZ1MXnT

Tech@ZWO ... I could ask for a sample setting for version 1.16, what should be the settings for meteor capture to work as intended, or how to record the video in a different way, with the condition that it would be determined in advance how big the file can be, after it is exceeded, the file will be closed and another one will be created automatically.. that could temporarily bypass our problem
Pavel

BvZ1MXnT

I have the same problem. I recorded the video with a ZWO ASI676MC camera. Exactly as John describes, there was an acoustic message at the beginning, then even though the meteors were clearly visible, they were not detected. I set the exposure to 1000 ms in the same way to see the sky well. The recording is almost 84 GB, but I cannot play it or process it. ASIVideoStack reports an unsupported format, when playing it directly it reports that the file is damaged or empty. I have the application version 1.16.0. I have the application on a laptop with the Ubuntu 25.04 operating system.

Pavel

johnpd

BvZ1MXnT

Apparently they have done nothing to fix this yet. When I tried it initially in April of 2024, I was able to pick up a meteor and it generated a 7 second .AVI file containing the meteor. Unfortunately I did not record my settings at that point but I was using v1.10 of ASIStudio. When I tried again in August for the Perseids with v1.11, I got nothing even with a 13 min .AVI file. So they did something between the two versions to mess things up.

I am able to use ASIVideoStack (v1.15) to stack one of the .AVI files. v1.16 supposedly on;y put in support for the new EAF focusers.

JohnD

BvZ1MXnT

johnpd .. thanks a lot for the info... it's a shame otherwise it's a nice machine and I was lucky yesterday during the recording I had a meteor with an explosion but unfortunately I can't play the video... but at least I saw it
Pavel

johnpd

I was trying to remember how this thing worked. I found that it buffers images. Once it captures a meteor, it writes out a video which contains s short period before the meteor is captured and combines it with the capture image. The actual final video is maybe a half minute or so. I thought I had heard a meteor being captured when I was doing it last August, but nothing showed up. When I first played with it back in April 2024 it worked. I would sure like to capture some Perseids next month, but the current ASIMeteorCapture does not seem to be up to the task.

JohnD

BvZ1MXnT

johnpd ... Hi John, I updated the application using the "Firmware Upgrade Tool" package. It is designed for EAF, but it has freshly compiled libraries that other components also use. So I downloaded the libraries to my ASIStudia installation and tried to capture meteors, not at night, but simply simulate during the day, and the videos started to save. It only took a few seconds, but with each beep it was saved. And yes, I also think that the image is recorded for a few seconds in the camera's memory (depending on the selected quality and recording time) and in detection mode it is overflowed to avi on disk.

The only thing that worked for me now (at night, during my first test) was that the data flowed smoothly to disk. I wouldn't mind it as an option with the ability to shorten the length to a certain size for easier processing.

The package contains the file fwupdate_linux.zip, at least for me, because I use Linux and there are directories in it and they contain newly compiled libraries. I copied these directories to my installation, thereby updating the versions of these libraries from 2022 to 2025.

Pavel

BvZ1MXnT

So verified that the detection works.. I'm testing it outside right now and the detection is working...
Pavel

BvZ1MXnT

Sometimes the save gets stuck, probably some problem with detecting the end of the event. I solve this by checking the storage if the save information doesn't show up after a certain time and if the last file is large and can't be played, then I disconnect the camera in the app, which saves the file properly, then reconnect the camera and it works again. It would be nice to set some kind of time limit that would determine that when it is reached the file would automatically end and close.
I'll probably have to play around with the mask settings a bit, I assume it serves to mark areas that can be excluded from meteor detection.

johnpd

I have not tried it since last August. I will try it again to see if ZWO fixed it.

JohnD