Mintron imaging with a 10" F/4.8 Newtonian

A Mintron MTV-23S85HC-EX-R monochrome deep-sky frame-integrating camera was used with an Opticstar 0.5 focal reducer and a light-pollution filter at the Newtonian focus of a 10 inch Orion Newtonian reflector. The real-time video was recorded in high quality to DVD. Later the DVD was played back through a capture card and AstroVideo was used with an XP computer to capture 180 frames with a frame captured every 5 seconds with scaled, dark-frame subtraction, registering and summing on the fly. The darkframe was the sum with fixed alignment of 20 frames captured from DVD recorded with the scope covered. The frame was scaled to 0.03 of the summed image rather than the 0.05 as would be expected if the camera did not auto adjust when covered.
M101


I shall experiment with HandyAvi on a Vista computer to capture frames, and dark-frame scaling in other applications before the frames are stacked in Registax.

Dont forget to click on 'Older Posts' or 'Newer posts' below or browse the 'blog archive' on the left, or click on 2009 to see all of the posts for this year on one page.

Capturing images from a Mintron under Windows Vista

The AVI capture software HandyAvi is ideal for capturing integrated frames from a Mintron under Windows Vista. This is a low cost, high quality piece of software that does not do the on-the-fly integration into 32 bit deep fits files that AstroVideo does, but it does produce AVIs that either it can stack, or Registax can stack.
HandyAvi can be obtained from http://www.azcendant.com/download.htm
It comes with a 170 page manual available in PDF format or readable online at:
http://www.azcendant.com/ViewManual.htm

Screenshot from HandyAvi

Six frames were captured at 5 second intervals: the interval between image updates on maximum, 256 frame integration. HandyAvi can be set to capture at fractions of a second as well so for example, frames could be captured at 2.5 second intervals if required. Play the movie below and note that the second hand of the clock jumps round at 5 second intervals.

I use a KWorld DVD Maker USB 2.0 capture card to capture data from the Mintron to a laptop computer as discussed in an earlier post.

Dont forget to click on 'Older Posts' or 'Newer posts' below or browse the 'blog archive' on the left , or click on 2009 to see all of the posts for this year on one page.