Sensor Analysis Gain Range and Steps

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eseavey
Posts: 54
Joined: Thu Jan 18, 2018 3:39 pm

Sensor Analysis Gain Range and Steps

#1

Post by eseavey »

I recently bought a new camera for astrophotography, and immediately did my sensor analysis. I have noticed that Sharpcap devides the gain range into 6 steps. Yet, someone posted their sensor analysis on cloudynights, and I saw his gain range was divided into 14 steps. Is there a setting where I can set how many steps the gain range is divided into?
The main reason I am asking is that I just bought the QHY168C and Sharpcap divided the gain range of 1 to 100 into 6 steps. What I am really interested in is the gain range between 1 and 20, divided into about 10 steps.

Tnanks
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admin
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Re: Sensor Analysis Gain Range and Steps

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

SharpCap tries to divide the total gain range into a reasonable number of steps (between about 5 and 12), the exact number depending on the size of the gain range and other things like the make of camera being used. There is a trade-off here because adding more steps to the gain measurement will make the sensor analysis slower and this can be considerably slower on some cameras with low maximum frame rates. There is currently no way for the user to influence the number of steps that the sensor analysis performs.

Unless your camera switches between HCG and LCG modes at some particular gain setting (which leads to a step change in the read noise at that point) then the 2 graphs that SharpCap produces are usually smooth curves so there isn't much to be gained by taking a very large number of measurement points.

Cheers, Robin
Jacques GORE
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2019 10:08 am

Re: Sensor Analysis Gain Range and Steps

#3

Post by Jacques GORE »

I recently bought a new camera for astrophotography (ZWO ASI294 MC Pro)... and i want to use in ShapCap (Pro license) the Sensor Analysis. Where are stored the data of this analysis, what is the file format (i.e xls, text...) ? The ZWO constructor indicates in the manual of this cam the data corresponding to results of their analysis (FW, Gain, DR and Read noise for this cam). To avoid a new (difficult) sensor analysis, how to use these data in SharpCap ?

Thank you,

Jacques GORE
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