How to capture planetary Images. ================================ 1 - Click the "Start" button in the "Camera" panel. 2 - Choose the camera in the little window that shows a list of camera drivers, and click "Ok" At this moment the camera starts up and a second window called "Integration window" will appear. In this window you will see the final images and will save them from there. 3 - Right now, just minimize the Integration Window, you don't need it yet. The video window located in the main window will be used to "target" the object you want to capture. In this window you'll see a red square with a cross in it. This red square delimits a zone that is called "Detection zone". This zone lets you detect and center the object that you're capturing with the software tracking function. Its size can be set with the cursor located in the "ZOnes" ("Detection") panel located in the top right corner of the main window. With this, you can give the detection zone the right size so that the object you want to track fits completely in it. For example, for Jupiter, with a 2000mm focal length scope, you can set the size to about 60 pixels wide. The planet must fully fit inside the zone. 4 - Start the software tracking function by checking the "Track" checkbox located on the left side of the main window. You'll remark that when you fly over these 4 checkboxes with your mouse, you'll see just below a panel corresponding to the checkbow that shows up. In order to activate the corresponding panel, fly over the appropriate checkbox, and go to the panel, making sure you don't fly over another checkbox. If you do, the panel will change. 5 - After this, click the "Limit Detect." radiobutton. This will activate the best tracking mode for planets. 6 - Once this is done, click on the planet so that the detection zone starts tracking the planet. Around the detection zone, you'll see another zone, larger, delimited by a blue dotted line. It is called the Display Zone. It shows the exact part of the image that will be sent to the Integration window. This zone is synchronized with the detection zone. It will always follow all the movements that the planet may have, and helps minimizing the effects of the turbulence or the effects of a wind rattled scope. Its size can be set with the right hand cursor called "Display", near the one used for the detection zone (top right hand corned of the main window). You can set the center of the display window, by doing a RIGHT click on the video window. 7 - Set the size of the Display window so that the planet fits inside it, giving it enough margin. Eventually center it correctly (Right click) 8 - Now you can restore the integration window that was minimized at the beginning of this tutorial. Once you have finished this part, the planet should be correctly centered in the integration window, and shouldn't move much, except if your scope is not well polar aligned, in which case the planet should disappear within a couple of minutes from the screen. If your scope's alignment is correct, you should be able to do all kinds of things on the planet, like adjusting your focus or the gain and speed of the camera. SAVING THE IMAGES ================= Now that the planet is stabilized, you can start saving your images. IN the integration window, you'll see a panel called "Image file", and a field called "Prefix". In this field, you'll set the prefix to be used for the images that will be saved afterwards. 9 - Choose the folder where you'll want to save your images, by clicking the "Search" button. 10 - In the save window, choose the folder and the file prefix, and click "save" In the Prefix field now appears the full path where the images are to be saved. In the "Suffix" panel just below, the field called "Current number" contains the sequence number of the next image to be saved. Usually it starts at 1 and then increases with each image. The "Fixed length" field determines whether the suffix has a fixed length (0001,0002,0003...0245,0246..etc) or a variable length (1,2,3...245,246..etc) The checkbox called "Save parameters" lets you save, for each image, a file that contains all the parameters of this particular image. The file has a ".par" extension, and can be opened with a text editor. The checkboxed called "Single file" will write a single parameter file, with for each image, the exact time at which it was taken (HH:MM:SS,ddd). It can be useful for timing asteroid occultations for example. Now you can save the images automatically or manually. You can choose the mode by choosing the corresponding tab in the panel located just below the "Sequence(suffix)" panel. If you choose to save your images manually, you then just need to press the large "Save" button in the "Manual Save" tab. 11 - If you want to save image sequences, then choose the "Auto save" tab. 12 - First you're going to have to choose the frequency at which the images will be saved. Let's imagine that you simply want to save ALL the images, and that you will choose when to stop. For that, choose the following : First panel : "Once" Second panel : Save an image every "1" "images" Third panel : "until stopped" 13 - Once you have chosen the parameters, click the "Start" button located just below. As of now, all the images coming from the camera are being saved to disk. Notice the sequence number increasing with every incoming image. 14 - Now when you want to stop saving, click the "Stop" button You got it ! You now have on your disk a whole bunch of numbered bitmaps that you can import with your favorite image processing software. MOON AND LARGE OBJECTS For images of the moon and the sun, that are much larger, except if you want to capture images of small details, you should resize the display zone to 640x480. The tracking function is much less effective on the moon because it is a complex object, you can therefore deactivate it. Nevertheless you can do tracking on solar spots for example, but you should tell the software that the object to track is of "reversed" luminosity (dark object on light background) by checking the "Reverse" checkbox in the tracking function's panel (left of the main window). Below you'll find the list of the different actions that can be done with the mouse on the video window. LeftClick : ------------- Sets the center of the detection zone. See tracking function RightClick : ------------- Sets the center of the display zone. Shift-LeftClick : ------------------- Centers the detection zone in the middle of the video window. See tracking function Shift-RightClick : ------------------ Centers the display zone in the middle of the video window. CTRL-LeftClick : ---------------- Sets the center of the reticle See the reticle function CTRL-Shift-LeftClick : (only for scopes with a computer interface (serial or parallel)) ----------------------- Points the scope at the chosen part of the field. ALT-LeftClick : --------------- Set the position of the first or second measurement point See measure function