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Fishcamp Engineering Guide Camera User Manual

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Starfish Guide Camera
Starfish Guide Camera
User's Manual

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Summary of Contents for Fishcamp Engineering Guide Camera

  • Page 1 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Starfish Guide Camera User’s Manual...

  • Page 2: Table Of Contents

    How to - Auto Calibrate Images How to - Save images to Disk How to - Operate the Camera’s TEC cooler Operating as a Guide Camera How to - Setup the camera for guiding Hardware interface checks How to - Setup ‘Guiding’ mode on the program...
  • Page 3 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Calibrate the guider to your mount How to - Start Guiding Reference - Guider Windows Reference - Guiding -> Summary tab view Reference - Guiding -> Guide Star Data tab view Reference - Guiding -> Guide Star Error tab view Reference - Guider ->...

  • Page 4: Limited Warranty

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Limited Warranty The Starfish camera hardware is warranted to be free from defects in materials and workmanship for a period of one year from date of shipment from fishcamp engineering. Defects caused by misuse, abuse, or shipment are not covered.

  • Page 5: Introduction

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Introduction...

  • Page 6: Installation

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Installation Hardware I/O Connectors GUIDER Pin #1 Back of Starfish Camera showing I/O connectors ‘Guider’ connector - this connector is used to connect the Starfish camera to your telescope mount so that it can control the mount movement. Guide corrections to the mount are accomplished through this interface.

  • Page 7: Guider Port Pinouts

    ST-4 style guider port. The ST-4 guide port is named after the Santa Barbara Instruments Group ST-4 guide camera that was manufactured years ago. The ST-4 interface uses a modular style RJ-12 connector and jack similar to telephone cabling.

  • Page 8: Software Installation

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Software Installation Microsoft Windows Software Support PC support for the Starfish camera comes with a Windows XT driver and camera plug-in support for various image capture applications. Regardless of which image capture program you use, you will need to install the Windows XP driver first.

  • Page 9: Mac Os X Software Support

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Mac OS X Software Support Insert the CD-ROM that came with the Starfish camera and double click the install pro- gram’s icon to start the installation procedure. Follow the on-screen instructions. There are four files that will be installed on your computer by the installation: 1) ‘gdr_usb.hex’...

  • Page 10: Starlink Tutorials

    Operation Tabs: • Guiding - tabbing to this view will allow you to operate the Starfish camera as a telescope mount guide camera. • Imaging - tabbing to this view will allow you to use the Starfish camera as a pri- mary imaging camera.
  • Page 11 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Sub-operation Tabs: Below the ‘Operation Tabs’ are a set of ‘Sub-operation Tabs’. These allow you to bring up views that display more detailed information applicable to the currently selected top level view.

  • Page 12: How To - Take A Picture With The Starfish Camera

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Take a Picture with the Starfish Camera 1) Connect the Starfish camera to your computer via the supplied USB interface cable 2) Double click the ‘StarLink’ application icon to launch the camera’s control program.
  • Page 13 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera 4) Press the ‘Camera’ sub tab under the ‘Imaging’ main tab view. Select a Camera Then press ‘Connect’ 5) Select a camera from the camera popup control and then hit ‘connect’. This defines the camera that you will be using for subsequent operations.

  • Page 14: How To - Adjust The Image Display

    There are two sets of controls. One for the Main Imaging Camera Window and the other for the Guide Camera Window. You select which set of controls are active via the tabs at the top of the Image Adjustment win- dow.
  • Page 15 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Another related topic to image adjustment is the histogram display that can be a useful tool for determining the correct exposure setting when taking a picture. Getting most of the pixel values in a wide range across the possible pixel values will help you get the most information out of your image.
  • Page 16 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Drag mouse over histogram to show bin information. Dragging the mouse across the histogram graph will display information cumulative to all of the histogram bins selected. This can be helpful in determining features visible in a particular image.
  • Page 17 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera There is one last tool that you can use to help understand the pixel intensity levels in your captured images. In the image display window if you hold down the <option> key while mousing around the image, the intensity of the pixel under the mouse will be dis- played.

  • Page 18: How To - Work With A Sub-Frame Of The Image Sensor

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Work with a sub-frame of the image sensor. The Starfish camera has a native resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels. A single image from the camera will have a total of 1.3 Mpixels. However, the camera can be operated in a sub-frame mode where an arbitrary rectangular region of the image is captured by the camera.
  • Page 19 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Defining a sub-frame region in the image window. Subsequent image capture.

  • Page 20: How To - Capture Calibration Data For The Image Sensor

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Capture Calibration data for the image sensor Modern image sensors have astounding image quality over those of older designs. However, astro-imaging places high demands on the sensor in terms of image quality due to the fact that the objects being imaged have such low light intensity.
  • Page 21 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera 60 seconds @ 25C 60 seconds @ 10C 60 seconds @ 25C 60 seconds @ 10C Dark frames taken at different temperature settings. ‘Flat’ frames are images taken with an even amount of illumination across the image sensor.
  • Page 22 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera 10 Second exposure (magnified) before Dark Frame subtraction example. 10 Second exposure (magnified) after Dark Frame subtraction example. On thing to note is that there will be some time-dependent variation in the calibration frames from random electrical noise sources within the camera. This is due to some basic physical properties associated with the image sensor itself.
  • Page 23 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera will exhibit. To circumvent this, you will usually take several different images of each type of calibration frame and average or median combine them together before using them. A good rule of thumb is to take at least 5 of each calibration frame.
  • Page 24 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera take a very long time. For instance, if the exposure setting is set to 180 sec- onds, and you are going to average 8 dark frames, it will take 24 minutes to take all of the required dark frames. Dark frames should also be taken with the image sensor at the same temperature that the final picture will be taken...

  • Page 25: How To - Auto Calibrate Images

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Auto Calibrate Images After you have acquired calibration frames for the camera’s picture taking session, you can use them to calibrate the images you take with the camera. The calibration frames are used in the following sequence: 1) Subtract the Master Bias Frame from the camera’s RAW image.
  • Page 26 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera The fourth check box allow you to perform a bad pixel removal operation on the image. Even after calibrating the image with the calibration reference frames, the image may have several hot or cold pixels. These are usually associated with defects in the image sensor and are at a fixed position relative to the pixel array in the sensor.

  • Page 27: How To - Save Images To Disk

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Save images to Disk You will usually want to save any captured pictures to your hard disk for later post- processing and viewing. The following controls allow you to save images to disk:...
  • Page 28 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera The following naming convention is used by the program to name the image files when they are saved: <prefix>_RAWlight_#.tiff <prefix>_CALlight_#.tiff So, for example, if you specify a file name prefix of “M51” and capture two pictures with the camera, the following image files are saved:...

  • Page 29: How To - Operate The Camera's Tec Cooler

    This is true for imaging sessions where the camera is used for short exposure settings like planetary imaging or operation as a guide camera. You would, however, want to turn the cooler on when imaging deep space objects that require long exposure durations.
  • Page 30 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Two controls are provided. The ‘TEC Enable’ check box allows you to turn on and off the cooler. The ‘Set Temperature’ number field allow you to set the target temperature of the cooler. The starfish camera can cool to a minimum of -12C below the ambient temperature. You can get an idea of what the ambient temperature is by looking at the ‘Current Tempera-...

  • Page 31: Operating As A Guide Camera

    How to - Setup the camera for guiding Hardware interface checks The Starfish camera was designed to be used primarily as a guide camera for your tele- scope mount. It does this by taking a picture of a star at regular intervals and determin- ing if your mount is tracking the star accurately enough.

  • Page 32: How To - Setup 'Guiding' Mode On The Program

    In the Starlink Control window, click the ‘Guiding’ operation tab. This puts the program into the mode used to operate the Starfish as a guide camera. The ‘Guiding’ and ‘Imag- ing’ modes of the control program can be used together but a given camera can be as- signed as either your primary imaging camera or your guide camera.
  • Page 33 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera While in ‘Guiding’ mode, the program will continuously take pictures with the camera. The exposure time and seconds between pictures can be set in the ‘Camera’ sub- operation tab view and determine the repetition rate that the pictures will be taken.

  • Page 34: How To - Acquire A Guide Star

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Acquire a Guide Star When in guide mode of the program the first thing that needs to be done is to get the camera taking a picture of the desired guide star and setting up to compute it’s location.
  • Page 35 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera The ‘Guiding -> Guide Star Data’ view will show more information about the nature of the imaged guide star. Of particular note in this view is the ‘Pixel Intensity Threshold’ slider. This slide selects the threshold level of intensity that the program assumes is part of the guide star.

  • Page 36: How To - Calibrate The Guider To Your Mount

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Calibrate the guider to your mount Guider Calibrate button The above view is used to calibrate the guider software to that of the mount and tele- scope optics used by the Starfish camera. Basically, the software has to figure out how guide corrections need to be communicated to your telescope mount.
  • Page 37 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera To perform a calibration, perform the following steps: 1) Center a guide star in the image window and define a very large region mask around the guide star. The large mask is necessary since the program will be telling the telescope to slew a potentially large distance.

  • Page 38: How To - Start Guiding

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera How to - Start Guiding After the system is setup as described above you can start guiding by simply checking the ‘Auto-Guide Enable’ check box. The system will start tracking the guide star at that...

  • Page 39: Reference - Guider Windows

    This view presents the user with only the most important information relating to the op- eration of the guide camera. As such, the information is a duplicate of the same infor- mation presented in some of the other tab views of the window. A screen dump of this view is shown below: The following controls and fields are presented in this view:...
  • Page 40 Camera Exposure Time (seconds) - you may define an exposure time that is used for all subsequent pictures taken by the guide camera. This value can be a minimum of 0.001 second up to a reasonable value of perhaps a couple of seconds. The increment is 0.001 seconds.

  • Page 41: Reference - Guiding -> Guide Star Data Tab View

    Normally, you would define this region by drawing a box around the guide star while holding down the <control> key in the Guide Camera Image Window.
  • Page 42 Normally, this is set to ‘1’ and the position calculation is based only upon the last image taken by the guide camera. In certain situations, such as during poor seeing conditions, you might want to average two or more readings before using the guide star position calculation.

  • Page 43: Reference - Guiding -> Guide Star Error Tab View

    The target position as well as the current guide star error from that target position is shown. This is calculated from the last image taken from the guide camera. Also shown is the first and second derivative of the guide star position. These corre- spond to the drift speed and drift acceleration status boxes in the view.

  • Page 44: Reference - Guider -> Parameters Tab View

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Reference - Guider -> Parameters tab view This view presents some of the most important information related to the guider per- formance. A screen dump of this view is shown below. Guider Parameters View Calibrate button - pressing this button will start the guider calibration procedure. The button will change to an ‘Abort’...
  • Page 45 Calculated Camera Angle - After the calibrate routine has completed, the program will calculate the angle of the guide camera relative to the main axis of the telescope mount. The results measured and displayed in the NORTH Slew Counts/sec and WEST Slew Counts/sec are used for this calculation.
  • Page 46 fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera new picture is taken. The integration time currently set for the camera will therefore take precedence to this parameter if it is longer. Minimum move - guide corrections are not sent to the mount unless they are at least big enough to exceed the value entered here.

  • Page 47: Reference - Guider -> Images Tab View

    Starfish Guide Camera Reference - Guider -> Images tab view The guide camera is continually taking pictures of the guide star region to make guide star position measurements. Normally, these images are thrown out after the position calculation is made.

  • Page 48: Reference - Guide History Window

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Reference - Guide History Window As long as a guider camera is connected, the history of the guider’s operations will be logged in the ‘Guide History’ window. A screen shot of this window is shown below: Guide History Window The guide history is show in both a graphical and a tabular view.

  • Page 49: Reference - Imaging Windows

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Reference - Imaging Windows Reference - Imaging -> Filter Wheel tab view The StarLink program has built in support for the Fliger Lakes Instrumentation line of filter wheels. The program will search for any filter wheels attached to the computer upon startup.

  • Page 50: Troubleshooting

    fishcamp engineering Starfish Guide Camera Troubleshooting Autoguiding An f/5 scope should be plenty fast enough to get a lot of bright guide stars.  In practice, with a one second exposure, you should be able to guide on mag 11 stars. First try guiding on a very bright guide star and see how your guide performance is.

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