This is a message I posted on the Cloudy Nights CCD Imaging Forum. Someone suggested I post it here, where the software developers are more likely to see it.
“All I can say on this during true cloudy night is that yesterday evening I downloaded the new software, installed it, and plugged in and powered up my 460EX, and took a bunch of darks (that is frames with the cap on).
Relative to earlier versions of the software (the online manual is dated in 2016, so needs an updating) the changes seem small. Obviously there is a cooling panel for the 400 series cameras, with the ability to turn on and off the cooling, set the temperature, see the actual temperature, and then set it to warm up at the end of a session (likely to avoid any thermal shock to the chip). I suspect that for the Horizon there would be gain control somewhere (the 400 series have fixed gain I understand). There is nothing that changes how stacking occurs that I could see (I understand it be averaging). I was stacking but not aligning, because I had no stars, so I cannot attest to the speed of stacking. I also did not see any control for the number of stacks. They just keep stacking.
Downloads were plenty fast, with the 400 series being USB 2. I did not time them but the impression I had was that there would be no problems stacking exposures of a few seconds, but that this was not going to be a planetary camera. CORRECTION: I did time downloads this AM and from the 460EX they are about 6 seconds, timed by steamboats.
The interface is simply great, or greatly simple. Love it. One important thing for those of us with modern video and monitors/screens is that the interface and fonts scaled nicely to both a standard monitor and a high pixel pitch screen, such as on a Surface Pro. In contrast, Starlight Live doesn’t scale well and the text in the user interface was essentially unreadable on the Surface Book screen.
All in all, very, very nice software. I am looking forward to trying it out on real stars with my 460EX.
And, as every software developer knows, as soon as you release something the reaction is twofold: (1) great and (2) why don’t you also do.....
In in the spirit of the latter, and being of the view that the Infinity software is likely to be a major source of competitive advantage for Atik’s cameras, I offer a few suggestions, with no sense of importance or ease of coding.
First would be dark subtraction, although the 400 series are known to not much need darks. Maybe the Infinity camera could benefit. No idea about the Horizon.
Second might be flats too. Then one can better deal with the vignette challenge that is coming as we simultaneously try to make our imaging train faster (focal reduction below F5 or even F4 say) and our imaging chips bigger, especially for video.
Third would be a simple stack count limit, so one could ask for a max number of stacks. If nothing else we can then report how many stacks we made for an image, because we set it.
Fourth, possibly, is stacking options. Here, though, my brain hurts when I read on CN about summing versus averaging with different chips. Maybe it matters less than we think. But, if summing enables one to go deeper it would help where actual exposure lengths are field-rotation limited (alt-az mounts) or tracking limited (poorer mounts).
So, my congratulations to the software author(s).”
Topic: Some Feedback on New Infinity Software and Atik 460EX (Read 8682 times)
