New 383LC+ some general advice

[sterngucker]

Hi folks,
My name is peter and i'm a new member in this forum. I come from austria and started astrophotography last year. Santa Claus brought me a second hand 383LC+. I could not try the camera yet because of the terrible weather. I am a little bit experienced in using a non cooled ccd camera (i used a meade dsi 3pro before) but i think there is a little difference between these two. So, please can somebody give me some useful advice in using the 383LC+? Is there something special to take care ? Which software is the best with this camera? I have artemis capture, APT and nebulosity. When converting the fits into RGB how do you scale the three different color channels? 1:1:1 or is it depending on the image you have taken?
So, there are a lot of questions in my mind they need to be answered. Maybe you can help me.
The equipment i used is a 8" f4,5 newtonian and 120ED Semi apo on NEQ6pro and Mgen for guiding and some pictures from me can be seen in astrobin.com / username sterngucker.
You can answer me in both german or english and i hope my english is not too bad.
CS peter

[Chris]

There are some video files on the Atik site that should help with getting started, including how to use a pinhole to get an image.  That should be a good way to get used to using the camera without having to do so in the cold and dark.

For software I would start with the Artemis capture application and move on to others once that's working.

I can't help with colour images because I only use monochrome CCDs but starting with an image of something known may help to sort out scaling and selecting the correct colours.

Chris

[NickK]

I'm a 383L mono user but for colour, setting RGB values for filters is the same (also, for spectrographs).

Pick a star of a known type - the type gives a particular colour profile. Next compare your image colour values from the known profile.

Sorry I don't have the specific colour values for the Kodak 8300 matrix. The values from my baader LRGB set would be different.