Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

Anything that doesn't fit into any of the other forums
ramdom
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#21

Post by ramdom »

Yep, at least the EZCAP image rules out some sort of a hardware problem. Would being able to see the logs of these sessions help determine how to fix it?

I've tried everything obvious I can think of to make the histogram not look as spiky - going back to the defaults, removing the debayering, etc. but no luck. For now, my plan is to use Sharpcap to set up the imaging with this colour camera and then do the actual shots with the EZCAP software. I've gotten used to imaging without live stacking though I still am fond of seeing the image develop as it happens. I was so looking forward to trying out the brain function....

Do the banding supression/threshold controls do have a bearing on the spikiness? If I set those to maximum, then the white line stops being spiky - it looks like your white line from before but the resulting image still isn't spike free (and the RGB histograms definitely still look spiky). It may be less spiky but I can't really tell. I don't know - perhaps I'm grasping at straws.

Your livestacked images do not look spiky. Even after stacking as little as 7 frames, the histograms are smooth and non-spiky.

Previously you said to try "force still mode" to "on" but when I tried that I ended up with Sharpcap crashing. Furthermore, the histogram was "static" - when I changed the settings with force still mode set to on, the histogram wouldn't change at all. In general this setting is a disaster (Sharpcap crashes and restarts with the force still mode set to "off" which makes everything work again but am not sure how this mode works and how it would help.

--Ram
ramdom
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#22

Post by ramdom »

Also, until we sort this issue out, I plan to be using my 163M with the Sharpcap since I just renewed my license and the brain icon was showing up there without me needing to do a sensor analysis. I believe the histogram for the 163M was smooth (though initially I was capturing in RAW8 and the lumping together of the values in gap-separated bars also appeared to happen there - I always wondered why the histogram would look choppy and realised it was due to working at the lower bit depth).

In any event, since I use this mostly for narrowband imaging, when I do the sky measurement, exposure length determination, etc. do I need to do it on a per filter basis?

--Ram

PS: I'm also scratching my head about why this histogram binning isn't going right (either the per pixel values are being read incorrectly or they are being binned incorrectly, no?). Is it possible that the gain scale assumptions you make - could that influence how the pixel intensity values are interpreted/binned?

PPS: One thing I've not tried is 2x2 binning - I can try this and see if it changes things tomorrow...
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#23

Post by admin »

Hi,

It would certainly be worth capturing a flat type image at minimum gain to see if that helps with the spiky histogram issue.

You will find that you need to remeasure the sky brightness for each different filter as the electron/pixel/second value will depend on how much light gets through the filter from the sky background. After you've done this a few times you will probably learn how the brightness is measured for the different filters tend to relate to each other – it's likely that the ratios will remain similar from night to night even if the absolute values differ.

Cheers, Robin
ramdom
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#24

Post by ramdom »

Okay, I've made some progress I believe. The low gain flat didn't change anything but gave me a clue. I think the answer has to do with the white balance controls. At low gain, I noticed that the blue histogram, which is shifted to the left, wasn't looking as spiky compared to the red and green. I first thought it may have to do with it using only 8 bits but long story short, after some trial and error, I shifted the RGB white balance values to 0 and it wouldn't let me and made me set it to 1. At this point, I had to push up the gain/offset to get light in but the histogram lines now looked normal, more than ever before. So here's the image of the histogram I took on my phone (gain was 3500 for this exposure length):
20190818_004210.jpg
20190818_004210.jpg (165.46 KiB) Viewed 2801 times
and then here's the data from a single frame:

http://ram.org/images/space/downloads/testing/Capture3/

What do you think? I pulled up the fits file in PI and the histogram looks more like the frame I pulled out of EZCAP. The histogram in Sharpcap itself still isn't 100% smooth (though the blue one is more spike free than the other two) but it's a lot better than before. Also so far whenever I've played with EZCAP, it hasn't let me adjust white balance controls anywhere.

--Ram

PS: The image is just some light shining into an unfocussed telescope - it is not an equally illuminated flat.

PPS: I also had to use the other settings I believe to get this relatively spike-free histograms - high gamma, banding supression, etc. perhaps one or a few of these may not be needed now and I didn't check but they appeared necessary as I was trying to replicate the blue histogram behaviour which I captured to the red and green (somewhere in there was a setting where the blue looked as it did but the red and green were still spiky, like the very right corners of the Sharpcap histogram image you posted).
Last edited by ramdom on Sun Aug 18, 2019 8:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
ramdom
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Joined: Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:03 am

Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#25

Post by ramdom »

Also, whilst I'm not sure if I'm on the right track or not, I don't follow what the 247C manual says about the white balance (which is done in the context of using Sharpcap):

https://www.qhyccd.com/index.php?m=cont ... =30&id=138

Do I need to install that Sharpcap Patch as they instruct?

--Ram
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#26

Post by admin »

Hi,

It sounds like you are onto something here. For a lot of cameras White balance has values from may be 0 to 200 and 100 will be the default and 101 would be adding 1% to the blue level. It sounds here as though the white balance default might be one and setting a White balance of the two is effectively boosting the colour by doubling it!

The histogram on the most recent fits file that you posted certainly looks a lot better. Have you had a chance yet to try the sensor analysis with the white balance controls all set to one?

Cheers, Robin
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#27

Post by admin »

Hi,

Oh yes, no need to install the SharpCap patch. The idea of that is that it installs a newer version of the QHYCCD DLL on top of a previously installed version of SharpCap. Right now the latest version of SharpCap 3.2 has the most up-to-date DLL from qhy anyway so the patch won't get you anything as far as I know.

Cheers, Robin
ramdom
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#28

Post by ramdom »

Hi Robin, yeah, when I do a sensor analysis, it automatically resets the default white balance to 64,64,64 (as you can see from the log I posted before where I had it set to 32, 32, 32) before asking me to click "proceed"...

--Ram
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#29

Post by admin »

Hi,

What are the minimum and maximum values you can set for the white balance controls? Hopefully they'll be distinctive and I can put some code in double spot those minimum/maximum is and skip past the normal reset step.

Cheers, Robin
ramdom
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Re: Brain icon doesn't show - I have a valid license

#30

Post by ramdom »

The range of the white balance controls are 1 (min) and 255 (max).

--Ram
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