Titan Camera as Planetary

[jmelquist]

Interested if anyone is using the Titan on Lunar/Planetary?  if so how's it working?  what frame rates are you getting and how short exposures can you get (please specify the scope aperture).  of course examples would be great!  Cheers!

[Kaidan]

Hello,

I'm using a Titan-M for lunary / planetary imaging and the framerate is about 3.6fps at max quality mode. If you use "Preview mode", you can go to 10-11fps, but the offset jump from 250 to 1000 and show strong banding : i haven't try to use it yet ... since i just discovered few days ago that i was running 3.6 fps only in classical mode. I think "Preview mode" + "Region of interest" might lead to 15fps.

Moon (3 image mosaic) using Skywatcher 80ED, no barlow :



Moon using TMB Optical 130 Signature Series, Kepler 2.5x barlow (30 € barlow) :



Jupiter using TMB Optical 130 Signature Series, Kepler 2.5x barlow (resized x1.4):



All 3 images ... with 3.6fps ...

[jmelquist]

first off great images!  too bad about the low framerate - I thought 15fps full-frame was advertised?  guess since i'm on ATIK's site I could look it up, huih?!

[Steve]

Hi,

Nice pictures.  Many PC's hard disks cant support 15FPS.  Installing a ram disk and saving the good captures to hard disk later can help.

Steve

[jmelquist]

659x494x16bit would yield a full-frame (uncompressed) image of around 650KB (assuming this is a mono camera and not OSC).  Recording 15fps would only require a write speed of 9.31MB/s.  I dont' think you can buy a HDD with less than 75MB/s write speeds now days...  Seems to me that the USB2 would be the bottle neck before HDD.  But of course, USB2 can handle this transfer rate as well (20MB/s typical)...  the slowdown has to be system contention or driver issues, right?

on an aside, I assumed the Titan was a DSO modified for high frame rate...but the resolution is a bit light for DSO work...

[Steve]

Hi,  All I can tell you is what we see.  On several PC's the limitation is getting the data to disc rather than from the camera.
Steve

[Kaidan]

Steve, i made a custom acquisition software that keep the frames in the memory (to check if it was a HDD problem) and it didn't go over 3.6fps. I get the same fps using Artemis Capture (native), Nebulosity (native or ASCOM) or my software (ASCOM). I also get the same fps on my two computers, one is Core i7 Quad / USB3, one is Core 2 Duo / USB2. I guess the problem is somewhere else...

[jmelquist]

ok, sorry my point wasn't to say your wrong, by any means.  I'm just saying the HW shouldn't be throttling things.  thus the "use an SSD or in-memory storage" as a solution troubles me.  If this low framerate has been confirmed consistent across hardware and software applications (and that is seems to be up for debate) then there has to be a firmware or software issue.  As this low framerate seems consistent across software applications, I'm tempted to venture a guess on firmware/driver issue.  Obviously, the HW (both HDD and USB2) has been proven to handle this dataflow.  But again, i'm thinking out loud - I don't have this device, so I can't add and real world tests.

[Kaidan]

Made a new "daylight" benchmark with the Titan-M and Artemis Capture, "Preview mode", disabling "FIFO", "Full-frame" and got about 13.6 fps, 20ms exposures. Enabling ROI lowers the framerate (1 or 2 fps less). The offset map is still not very beautiful but it may not be visible when imaging since Moon or planets are very bright (but still need to use 2/3 or more of the histogram). I'll try on the moon and Jupiter when the weather permits.

[riklaunim]

For some reason all DS cam makers either don't want to make a real planetary camera, or just make a guider and label it a "planetary" camera. That's weird. And what's even interesting that you can find posts (like on SGL) that people would want to buy an Atik (real) planetary camera - despite enormous popularity of ICX618 cameras - starting with DMK21AU618

I shot Moon and Sun with Atik 314L+ as it has bigger sensor than my planet cam, but the 16-bit + low gain limits f-ratios only to those brighter ones (f/10 or brighter - where for planetary I use f/20-30 for a similar pixel-sized camera).

TSAPO65 + ND 3.8  + ND1% + yellow shortpass filter:


Older - C11 + DSI III Pro (like 314L, uncooled):
http://www.rkastrofoto.appspot.com/site_media/astro/orig/moon-17-07-2011/mosaic.jpg
http://www.rkastrofoto.appspot.com/site_media/astro/orig/moon_14_06_2011/eclipse_16_05_2011_2138ut.jpg

[jmelquist]

riklaunim, beautiful shot!  what a fun time to be doing solar work, huh?!

[riklaunim]

Spot season is a good thing

[Kaidan]

Here we go, a small mosaic of the Moon taken a few minutes ago (9 images) using "Preview mode" (13.6 fps), click on the picture for full size (1640x2550, 982kB) :



I'm happy : there's no visible banding or bad effect due to the bad offset map.

Setup : TMB Optical 130 Signature Series + Kepler Barlow x2.5 + 60mm spacing + IR/UV cut filter + ATIK Titan-M.

Edit : image updated.

[jmelquist]

Kaidan,  very sharp!  looks like the camera performed will even in preview mode?  what's different about preview mode (decreased resoltuion or bit depth or other?).  nice result either way!  Where are you shooting from?

[Kaidan]

Yes, the camera is ok even in "preview mode", at least on the Moon : Jupiter was not far yesterday but didn't have the time to give it a try (turbulence was not good anyway). I think the camera have an ADC (Analogic/Digital Converter) with 2 different clock (one for slow readout (autoguiding / deepsky) with low readout noise (reading at a few kHz) and another for fast readout (planetary) with higher readout noise (reading at a few MHz) used during "preview mode"). Resolution and bit depth are not decreased : still 659x494@16bits.

Took the picture from my garden, Piton Saint-Leu, Réunion island (-21S, 55E).