Moon Image Capture

rac

I am using FireCapture 2.50 with an ASI1600MC camera. Until now, I have good results capturing Planet images using a small ROI, say 600 x 400.

When I turned my attention to the Moon is seemed logical to use the full sensor resolution. When I clicked the record button to capture the image (to an AVI), the results were very poor, with horizontal lines moving up and down the images.

There was a message box on start-up saying that for AIS cameras, the "USBTrafiic" setting might need to be adjusted (down). I can't find said USBTraffic setting however.

What does seem to work is make use of the TimeLapse feature in FireCapture, For example, when I configured image capture at 5 seconds intervals for 30 seconds, I got 6 good quality images. No doubt the interval can be less than 5 seconds.

Any advice on the best way to capture images of the Moon with this camera would be appreciated.

moongene

In Firecapture upper left where gain, exposure, gamma, are there is a tab "more".

Click it to change the traffic setting.

rac

MoonGene wrote:
In Firecapture upper left where gain, exposure, gamma, are there is a tab "more".

Click it to change the traffic setting.

Thanks, I finally found the USBTraffic setting and reduced it to 40, but it made no difference. The computer is a Windows Surface 2, not what you would call powerful. It has only one USB port so I am using an external, powered USB hub. I wonder if the problem is somwehere in that mix?

rac

I removed the USB hub and plugged the camera directly into the only USB port of the Surface Pro 2. When I did this there were no torn frames so it would seem that the USB hub was causing problems.

The maximum frame rate was still only 2 seconds per frame but at least the images were intact.

Without a USB drive, storage space is quite limited on this computer. I am thinking of getting a 128 GB micro USB card solely for astronomical image capture.