What would cause this?

sjcunningham

My imaging setup is a SW Pro 100ED, SW 0.85 FF/FR, ZWO EFW with Baader 36mm un-mounted LRGB, Ha, OIII, and SII filters, and the Pro version of this camera. I have 16.5mm and 12mm extenders that gives me the required 55mm back focus to the camera sensor. I am using the latest ASCOM driver from your site installed. I have read on this site that the offset is set to 50, and can no longer be changed in the driver.

I use SGP v3 to capture my images, and also created darks and flats calibration frames. My post-processing is with StarTools. This is the result of 45x60 sec exposures with a gain setting of 71. The first image is what I see after AutoDev, and the second is after Wipe in StarTools.

autodev.jpg autodev.jpg

I am not sure if I am doing something wrong or if there is a problem with the camera. Any suggestions are welcomed. Thanks in advance.

Sam@ZWO

looks like hardware issue

you need to send back for repair

where did you buy it?

you can contact your dealer

sjcunningham

Hi Sam. Thanks for the quick response. I ordered the camera directly from your site. The order number was 9459. Do I send it directly back to you? If so, please provide mailing instructions. Thanks In advance.

Steve Cunningham

Support@ZWO

OK， I see. Please send us a email to info(at)zwoptical.com

We will tell you how to get this camera repaired, thank you very much.

sjcunningham

It looks like there is nothing wrong with my camera after all. The problem turned out to be my post-processing skills, or lack of, using StarTools. I was able to create a decent image with the same data, but different post-processing.

But I do have a question about the offset value which is set at 50. Is this a hardware setting that can not be changed? I know that you took that function away from the latest ASCOM driver. Would it be possible to use an older version of an ASCOM driver that had that function available to change that setting?

If not, this seems that using lower gain settings for brighter targets would require many more images with shorter exposure times to prevent the noise introduced by the higher offset of 50 overwhelming the image.

Support@ZWO

Offset is an addtional value works on all pixels, make histogram move to right a little.it won't interfere exposure time or something else.

Only will reduce a little dynamic range.