Atik 314L+ problem

[Xenon135]

Hi,
I recently bought a second hand Atik 314L+ camera and being not familiar with the Atik Capture program, I initially did tests in Sharpcap 3.2.

Well it seemed alright, although I did not know why even on single exposure, the SharpCap program was taking a preview of an image even though I set preview option OFF.

Well, it seems Sharpcap lost control of the Atik camera not long after connecting to it. It saved .tiff files but when I chose .fits files it failed to save them: at this time I thought Sharpcap had lost control altogether of the Atik.

Question: is there a setting or option I should be checking for to make sure I am using the right Atik/ASCOM driver. At the moment, Atik 314L shows up on the camera select menu. I can also make the cooler work ok. The only thing is when taking an exposure e.g. 3 or 4 minutes, SharpCap seems out of sync or lose control of the camera.

Many thanks.

Kwong

[Xenon135]

Hi All,

I had another test today on the Atik 314L+. The first time I lost control of the camera and I was not able to establish the camera to save or capture a frame.
The second time, I set the frame rate to 1 every 4 seconds and preview mode off. I set the Capture menu to a specified number of frames, and the exposure was 10s or 30s.

Well this time it did work, and it saved FITS files !
So I am not sure why it sometimes works.

I enclose the log of the 2nd session. Maybe someone can tell me what could be a bug or is it just me not using it correctly ?
[file is compressed by windows to a smaller size, simply uncompress the file in windows to view it]

Many thanks.
Kwong

Log_2023-06-06T10_59_49-13700.rar

(89.53 KiB) Downloaded 359 times

[admin]

Hi,

there seems to be nothing going wrong in your second log. I would suggest that you try updating SharpCap (4.0.8395 which you are using is from November 2021 - there have been a lot of bug fixes and improvements since then). Please try 4.0.9562 from https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/downloads

It's also worth checking that you have the latest Atik core software installed - if you have an old version of that it may impact operation.

cheers,

Robin

[Xenon135]

Thanks Robin,

I have downloaded it and will test the Atik again.

Kwong

[admin]

Hi,

do let me know if you still have problems - I have an Atik314L+ here (it's the only Atik camera I have), so in *theory* it should be the one that is most likely to work correctly out of all of them

cheers,

Robin

[AstroLaptop]

I realise this topic is over a year old but maybe someone will see it.

Why do I have so many Atik 314L cameras to choose from??

Any thoughts on which one I should use or just try them all and see which works best?

I shall have a hunt around the forum and see if this question has already been answered.

[MEKBUDA]

Hello Robin,

I am considering the purchase of this camera.

As you use it, I would like to know if you can livestack with it on Sharpcap?

Thank you for the information.

[admin]

Hi,

it's quite an old model now, so you should make sure that you get it at a very good price. I haven't used it for actual telescope imaging as I much prefer the CMOS approach to imaging (lower read noise allows you to take shorter exposures and more of them, rather than a smaller number of long ones). It should work fine for live stacking though.

cheers,

Robin

[MEKBUDA]

Thanks RObin