Equipment
Stella Mira 66 ED APO refractor with a field flattener and Altair magnetic 2" filter holder with an Altair Quadband filter, mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. An SVBONY SV405CC 14 bit, cooled CMOS camera was used as an INDI camera rather than as a native implemented camera that we would normally use. The cable management was as previously described with the weight of the data and power cables being held by the mount rather than he scope. This leads to better tracking and auto-guiding.
As usual, the mount was placed on marks on the ground which quickly gives quite a good polar alignment if care is taken with the placement of the tripod feet.
Mount and focus control were done by AstroDMx Capture via an INDI server running on the imaging computer indoors.
AstroDMx Capture sent the mount with plate solving, to the star Altair for focusing with a Bahtinov mask
Auto pulse-guiding was done by a separate Linux computer also running indoors (although it could have been done if required, on the imaging computer). An SVBONY SV165 guide scope with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was used for autoguiding.
For testing the INDI cameras implementation in AstroDMx Capture, we chose the SV405CC 14 bit OSC as the example INDI camera.
In the AstroDMx Capture Connect Camera dialogue, there is a drop down menu that allows the selection of the INDI framework or the Native camera implementations.
Nicola has organised the AstroDMx Capture GUI so that INDI camera controls are presented in the same way as native cameras. However AstroDMx Capture is limited to what camera functions have been implemented in INDI. For example in the native implementation of the SV405CC, Auto white balance and One touch white balance is implemented, but neither of these are implemented in INDI. White balance control is limited to RGB sliders.
We did not attempt to use the RGB sliders so we left them at the INDI default which produced a very green preview.
AstroDMx Capture captured 1 hour’s worth of 5 minute exposures of the North America Nebula
The overall green hue can be seen clearly.
With a negative preview
AstroDMx Capture has among its preview controls, a non-destructive control that we call DMx Auto WB. This produces a more pleasing white balance for the preview but does not affect the data saved in 16 bit images.
The preview when using the DMx Auto WB control
A much more pleasing preview was produced
With a negative preview
The INDI camera implementation in AstroDMx Capture worked well. The DMx Auto WB proved to be very useful for producing a pleasing preview whilst not affecting the saved data.
The captured data were calibrated and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, processed in the Gimp and the Starnet++ Gimp plugin, Neat Image and Photoscape X Pro.
The North America nebula
