Santa Barbara Instrument Group ST-5C, Operating Manual

Page: 31 / 42

Section 5 - Hints and Tips
Page 27
5. Hints and Tips
This section contains hints and tips to get the most use out of your camera and software. There
is a section of Question and Answers to the most common questions followed by several
sections of tips.
5.1 Question and Answer
This section contains answers to some of the more common questions we hear in the Technical
Support department.
Q. Is there a short cut to focusing the camera? A. We find the best method to be using the peak
brightness as described in the manual but there are almost as many opinions here as there are
people.
Q. How often do I need to refocus? A. When there has been a big temperature change (3 °F) or
when you have moved to a different region of the sky with an SCT, you should consider
refocusing.
Q. What is the back focus of the camera? A. Please refer to Figure 2.2.
Q. What is the extra rectangular bar that came with the camera ? A. It is a tripod mount that you
screw into the side of the camera that allows you to mount the camera on a tripod if you plan to
fit it with camera lenses.
Q. Can I use a camera lens with the camera? A. Yes, SBIG sells an adapter for the camera that
allows you to use C-mount or other lenses with the camera.
Q. Can I operate the camera off of a car battery? A. Yes you can. You'll probably want to use a deep
cycle marine battery and you'll have to purchase a cable.
Q. How cold should the CCD get? A. You should be able to work around 30 degrees Celsius
below ambient.
Q. Who should I contact when I have questions or problems with the camera? Contact SBIG and ask
for Technical Support. If your questions are general in nature you might try subscribing to the
SBIG User List on the Internet. Technical support information and instructions on how to
subscribe to the SBIG User List can be found on our home page at <www.sbig.com>.
Q. How long of a cable can I use between the PC and the CPU? A. You should be able to use cables
up to 100 feet in length but it will vary from PC to PC.
Q. Where can I get a longer cable? A. Go to your nearest computer store and ask for a 25 pin male
to female extension cable.
Q. Where can I get a shorter cable? A. Go to your nearest computer store and ask them to make
you a short 25 pin male to female crimp type cable.
Q. Why does the software say there isn't enough memory? A. You need to make sure you have at
least 1 Megabyte Extended memory and that the HIMEM.SYS driver is loaded into your
CONFIG.SYS file. Also check that other entries in the CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT files
are not consuming too much memory.
Q. I see dark spots in my images, what causes them? A. If the dark spots are a single pixel they are
typically caused by hot pixels in the CCD saturating and can be removed with the Remove Cool
Pixels command. If they're several pixels wide you should suspect dust on the window and
that effect can be removed with flat fielding your images or clean the window with an "air
duster".
Q. My images have dark tendrils in the corners. What can I do? A. These are caused by the CCD
frosting and you need to replace the desiccant as described in Appendix C.4.