Hello all,

This is my second day trialling CCD Inspector, yesterday I spend an hour checking collimation of a 9.25" SCT - until the error was less than 0.2" when the clouds came in. All worked well!

Today I tried to check the focus on 11 RAW files (taken as a series of 1 second shots of Jupiter and its four moons) captured from a Canon 400D and placed in a working directory.

I open CCD - select the files, highlight them and pressure measure all. It processes for a while and asks the image scale (0.645 arc/secs a pixel) the it processes the first file and hangs.

I tried it 6 times - reboot twice and re-install (repair) CCD Inspector - then on a second larger PC (quad core - 2GB RAM). All exhibited the same behaviour under Windows XP SP3 - after a while it just says non responding and I have to cancel it. The progress bare is just up to the black triangle next to the words Image File in each run.

Interested to know if this is fixable!

Thanks,

Matthew

Hi Matthew,

400D Raw format was not on the supported list for CCDI version 1.x. The support is coming out in version 2.

A few things to check:

1. Double-click on one of the RAW images listed in CCDI. Does the image display? Does it look right? If CCDI is reading 400D files, it's possibly just luck that some of them work.

2. If the image does display but hangs when measuring, this is possibly due to a large number of stars being detected and analyzed. With CMOS sensor, these are likely many false stars due to sensor noise. To see if this is a problem, go to CCDI Settings->Noise Threshold and set it to Medium or even High. This will reject most of the sensor noise much more efficiently, and will stop CCDI from trying to measure a large number of hot pixels.


Regards,

-Paul

Paul,

Thanks for the quick reply! When I double click on a single image it displays - but strangely - you get a double image left and right, the left image is red and the right image is blue!

Re point 2 - setting the noise threshold high doesn't help - as the image is already quite dark.

I do have the full Maxim DL - so can I use that to drive convert images to check focus rather than snap images with the Canon Driver via DSLR Shutter - which sends images to Canon's Zoom Browser - which I then don't load to the computer to analyse?

Other than that - any idea when version 2 which will support RAW format files will come out?

The last option could be to set the camera to delivery JPG files.

So several ways forward - interested to see which you recommend!

Many thanks,

Matthew

Hi Matthew,

That sounds like the image is not being decoded correctly. I think you'll need to wait for version 2 to handle 400D images correctly.

Version 2 is ready and will be released very, very soon (literally within a week.)

JPEG files are not good for CCDI analysis -- they store only 8 bits of information and introduce significant artifacts that will distort star shape measurement.

If you want to test out an image in version 1 anyway, I would use a Canon RAW converter into a 16-bit TIFF image, and then load the TIFF image into CCDI for analysis. I believe Canon Image Professional utility will do the conversion.

Regards,

-Paul

Paul,

I used Photoshop CS2 to convert RAW to tiff - worked fine (although every shot gave a random FWMH 60, 61, 63, 62, 60, 61, 63, 60, 62 etc) results - so I must do more experimentation. I simply judged best focus then used the JMI driver for a ShoeString Astronomy USB converter to get my Meade Motorfocus to move the camera steadily outwards in constants intervals over 11 shots - so I expected to see focus get better or worse (and/or show an inflection point as best focus is reached and lost). But all I observed looked like a random reading...

I presume Jupiter and its moons aren't the best subject to focus on?

Lastly can MaximDL act in concert with CCD Inspector to run the Canon 400D and send images to CCD Inspector in a format it can handle? If it can't I'll wait til Version 2 comes out and see how that goes.

Many thanks,

Matthew

Matthew,

CCDInspector 2 is now available. I would suggest you try it.

http://www.ccdware.com/Files/CCDInspector200.zip

Regards,

-Paul

Wow - I will be delighted to give it a run tonight - sky willing! Are you always this fast?

Cheers,

Matthew