I picked up an adapter for my ASI120 and 174 to enable them to be used with Canon camera lenses. I am trying to get them to work with either sharpcap or firecap, and finally when they failed, Orion capture software. Let me try to describe the issue as best I can
Here is what is happening, I attach the lens and hook up the 120. I open sharpcap and choose the 120 camera. It gives a screen shot and sometimes lets me focus or compose (using a tree a few hundred feet away) other times it is just a frozen screen shot. I can unselect the camera and go back in and select it again and “usually” it shows the new screenshot but often the previous one. This happens in all 3 programs. I cannot compose or focus.
Concentrating on Sharpcap and the Orion product I decided to see what happened when did a capture, which with solar and lunar allows you to watch what you are getting (of course solar and lunar allow you to focus and compose before capture (feature? Or they are brighter?)
Anyhow when I do a capture I can compose and focus and adjust the exposure and the gain gamma etc, I suppose you could use captures for doing that and then do another capture for the actual shot. I seem to remember this problem when I was trying to do prime focus with one of my scopes.
The reason I am trying this is I want to play around with DSO’s and clusters with my ASI camera’s rather than just my Canon 70D, I know the 120 and 174 are not DSO cameras but they are what I have.
I will play with it to see what happens with I try 5 second exposures, will it cause a real lag in adjusting anything?
Other than Sharpcap and Firecapture I haven't heard of any capture software, evetything I have heard about is for combining and stacking and processing. Which is fine if you have the image.
To use M42 Orion as an example, how would I capture it in order to get a file I can edit on my PC? With the sun and the moon I have no problems using Sharpcap, but with a camera lens (I will test it again with my ST80 prime focus) I am having the problems above. This is during the day, not at night so the smaller lens diameter shouldn't be an issue and when I was able to see the shot it showed fine at about 55ms.
I had thought about a cooled ASI like the 1600 but if these are the issues I will stick with my 70D. How do people use CCD cameras for DSO's I know it is done...
