Handbook for the TRIUS PRO-694C Issue 1 September 2020
8
After the exposure and download have completed (about 4 seconds) an image of
some kind will appear on the computer monitor. It will probably be poorly focused
and incorrectly exposed, but any sort of image is better than none! In the case of the
pinhole, all that you can experiment with is the exposure time, but a camera lens can
be adjusted for good focus and so you might want to try this to judge the high image
quality that it is possible to achieve.
Various other exposure options are available, as can be seen in the picture above.
For example, you can ‘Bin’ the download by 2x2, or more, to achieve greater
sensitivity and faster download, or enable ‘Continuous’ to see a steady stream of
images. The Histogram plot allows you to see the status of the image brightness
distribution and you can adjust the sliders to optimise your view.
If you cannot record any kind of image, please check the following points:
1)
Ensure that the power indicator lamp is on and that the cables are properly home
in their sockets.
2)
If the screen is completely white, the camera may be greatly overexposed. Try a
shorter exposure time, or stop down your lens. See if covering the lens causes the
image to darken.
3)
If the USB did not initialise properly, the camera start-up screen will tell you that
the connection is defective. Try switching off the power supply and unplugging
the USB cable. Now turn the power supply on and plug in the USB cable. This will
re-load the USB software and may fix the problem after restarting Starlight
Vision. Otherwise, check the device driver status, as previously described, and
reinstall any drivers with appear to be defective.
4)
If you cannot find any way of making the camera work, please try using it with
another computer. This will confirm that the camera is OK, or faulty, and you can
then decide how to proceed. Our guarantee ensures that any electrical faults are
corrected quickly and at no cost to the customer.
As the PRO-694C is a ‘Single-shot’ colour camera, the full resolution raw image will
show a fine grid pattern, due to the RGB colour filters on the CCD chip surface. This is
normal and will disappear once the image has been converted to colour by the
software. Unlike commercial digital cameras, astronomical colour cameras do not
normally output a colour image directly. This is so that various image corrections can
be performed on the raw data (e.g. dark frame subtraction), as these are impractical
after conversion to colour. Also note that binning the raw image at anything other
than 1x1, will destroy any colour information and so output only monochrome
images.
Converting your images to colour:
