Astro features for digicamControl (PhD guiding)

Use this forum to request new features or suggest modifications to existing features
Duka Istvan
Posts: 867
Joined: Tue Mar 26, 2013 9:52 pm

Sombody know how to calculate

Post by Duka Istvan » Mon Jun 17, 2013 12:02 pm

Sombody know how to calculate the FWHM value from a image ?

Sombody know how to calculate

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D600
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Jun 14, 2013 8:10 pm

Check out Wikipedia

Post by D600 » Mon Jun 17, 2013 11:29 pm

Check out Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_width_at_half_maximum
I am not a programmer or good at mathematics so I can not confirm that info is correct.

Kuulapaa
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:10 pm

PHD guiding

Post by Kuulapaa » Tue Jun 18, 2013 9:21 am

I'd say that we must be realistic on feature lists. Including all those mentioned would be helluwa job, even for commercial coder not even to mentioned open source.

PHD guiding is very relevant feature to have for DSLR astrophotography. Of course guiding is not done by camera itself but separate chip. Automatised exposure series and dithering between the frames while PHD guiding is what people really need.

Keep up to good work!

D600
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Jun 14, 2013 8:10 pm

But PHD works very good as a

Post by D600 » Tue Jun 18, 2013 12:13 pm

But PHD works very good as a standalone program. I have successfully used a webcam as a autoguider camera and PHD controls my mount. But how is it going to be implemented in digicam control program? It does not have anything to do with DSLRs?

The features I mentioned are only requests, I suggest to do autofocus possible and be able to take long exposures is the most important requests for astrophotagraphy.

Kuulapaa
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:10 pm

Key word is automation

Post by Kuulapaa » Wed Jun 19, 2013 6:47 pm

It works fine alright but keeping "exposing same pixels to same light" is not the wise thing to do. Ok, you get decent results and it kills random noise but no pixel grid noise patterns. To get good results you however want to dial in exposure sequence with dithering commands between frames and get somewhere else. It will make one crazy person to move scope few pixels back and forth in random pattern between frames whole night and several nights in row. Trust me, I don't feel well ;)

whwang
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed May 15, 2013 9:55 am

I agree with Kuulapaa.

Post by whwang » Sat Jun 22, 2013 6:43 pm

I agree with Kuulapaa. digicamcontrol is a great piece of open source work. We don't want to flood Duka with a load of astro-only functions. This will only distract him from the main part of the programming, and this may eventually hurt the project.

Once good guiding and focusing can be achieved routinely, dithering is the next most crucial part in deep-sky astrophography for high image quality both in terms of resolution and S/N. Automizing dithering is essential and requires the communication between the image capture app and PHD. Once this is done, I would say that digicamcontrol is fully (or 99%) capable of astrophotography already. Let's leave the rest 1% later when Duka has more spare time.

I am sorry again that the wether here has been horrible in the past few months. I couldn't test the dither function under real sky. I will when I have a chance.

gwondaleya
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon May 13, 2013 10:12 pm

Few comments to D600, since i

Post by gwondaleya » Sun Jun 23, 2013 8:42 pm

Few comments to D600, since i do not fully agree with him about the feature to be implemented within an image capture tool which "basically" Digamcontrol is.
1 and 2 is already here !
3 is probably a nice to have, and can probably be integrated with the use of liveview and a tool for FWHM measurment/
basically a way to do it is to have in the script a command allowing live view and measuremnt on a star through FWHM. Howver Live view is may be limited, since only the brightest stars can be seen.
4. tools already exists that can do the necessary measurments on still images (and even on live images) and that is even possible to control an ascom focuser with these tools.
6. is unneeded , we do not guide with the dSLR..and it is not possible to do it in the same time as imaging...
7...well take a picture and do the necessary into carte du ciel.that's not a great deal to do that outside of the capture program ..
8 PHD guiding is VERY relevant to do dithering. PHD guiding do not do dithering by itself, it need external commands to do so.

MAximDL is a professionnal tool which cost many dollars (500 for the dSLR version...).....
Digicam is free...and already do a very nice job!!

Joël

whwang
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed May 15, 2013 9:55 am

some feedback

Post by whwang » Sat Jun 29, 2013 8:50 pm

Hi,

I finally got some nice weather here and tried version 558 under real star. Here is what I can suggest.

1. The astro live view is nice. I suggest to allow the users to rotate the cross-hair and to specify the rotation angle. Additional to changing the brightness of the live view, it will be also very useful if we can change its contrast. Sometimes this is necessary to see faint stars.

2. As someone pointed out before, the astronomy window should be called astronomy, but not astrology. When this window is opened, the title on the window is call "bulb" and may be confused with the traditional bulb window. So I suggest to change the name of the title to astronomy.

3. The PHD commands seem to tell PHD to do the right thing. I see that there is a script sub-window in the astronomy window. I haven't fully understand how to use it. However, from a user's point of view, it will be nice if the PHD dithering function is built into the sequence bulb function. For example, maybe you can add a sub-window called PHD. There could be a check box "enable PHD dithering" and other associated parameters. If the box is checked, then between every bulb exposures, digicamcontrol can send a dither command to PHD, wait for PHD to finish, and then wait for a few seconds (user specifiable) of settling time, and then start the next exposure. I am not a programming expert and I don't really know how many communications and parameters are involved here. Maybe gwondaleya and others can provide more details. It will be great if this procedure and be automized.

Thanks.

Wei-Hao

whwang
Posts: 8
Joined: Wed May 15, 2013 9:55 am

error message

Post by whwang » Sat Jun 29, 2013 8:54 pm

OK, one more thing :P
After I close the astronomy window, an error message shows up.
Please see the attached image.
My camera is D800.

gwondaleya
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon May 13, 2013 10:12 pm

Hi Wei Hao,

Post by gwondaleya » Mon Jul 01, 2013 10:07 pm

Hi Wei Hao,

actually what you are looking for is already in the astronomy interface. All is done in the script window. It is not complicated , neither need programming skills. In this script window, you just add the command you want to be done by digicam.they are of 3 types:
bulbcapture (which tell itself what it is, with parameters capture time, iso, aperture)
waitcommand(which tell to..well.. wait, basically for the download of photography to be done)
Phdguiding, which ask to phd to do a dithering move(1 to 5) and then to wait for mount stabilization)
So that it is quite easy...
The only thing is perhaps that it may be somewhat repetitive to write a script for taking many shots.
This may be solved by having something like a loop command embedding the other 3 commands.
I really like the script idea, since it is the most convenient and the most powerful way of having a soft doing exactly what you want.
if the script writing is as easy as it is in digicam..then it is "paradize" !!

Joël


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