Useful Info
I attempted some imaging last night after not using the scope for nearly a year. Everything seemed fine - good focus values, PhD 2 happy, plate solving almost instantly, all good. Started a 3-hour sequence of 90 second exposures and after an hour, I had only saved around 12 images to disk. I have the ASi2600 connected directly to my laptop, which has plenty of storage space on the internal drive I use, and I also tried swapping USB 3 cables and USB ports. I’m attaching the log in case there is any additional info therein and would appreciate any suggestions. Still using 3.x because I find it the most stable and reliable (many, many hours of capture prior to last night).
We have native support back in the later versions of SGP which speed this up considerably. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with the ASCOM driver which is quite slow.
Thanks very much. I’d like to try a native version - (never used one) . Are there any docs. on setting that up and or is it pretty much “plug and play?” I assume I would need a new profile.
I was glad to see the native ZWO support come back! My downloads binned 1x1 are about 55 MB and would take about 10 to 12 seconds with the native driver vs about 18-20 seconds with the ASI. At least that’s what I got with the old MINIX computer. The new upgrade to a Neosmay fanless with 16gb ram and a clock speed of 3.8ghz is much faster. Native ZWO download was about 2 seconds! However, in all the subs, both light and dark, I can see the very fine grid lines of the bayer matrix in the image. So far nothing I have tried gets rid of them. I went back to the ASI driver, and with the new computer was getting about 10 second downloads…a bit of improvement. Then I realized that the ASI driver has a USB limit slider…I used to have to keep it way left to get images with the old computer. Moved all the way right to 100% I now get images downloading at 3 seconds!!! Check how far you can move the USB slider before the it starts glitching. I’ll stick with the ASI driver now…no grid lines and almost as fast as the native.
Interesting info. How did you select between the ASI and native drivers? I never had an issue downloading (thousands of) images until I got back to the hobby this week, so not quite sure what’s going on but will check the USB limit slider - is that in the Camera settings?
You have to download and install both the ascom driver and the ZWO native driver from the ZWO site. Then just select either ZWO for the native driver, or ASI for the ascom version in the equipment profile manager. You can also select either from the sequence window. Just be sure to disconnect from one driver before selecting the other and reconnecting so the camera doesn’t get confused. The USB limit only shows up with the ascom driver. Access it via the settings icon next to the driver select window for the camera.
John
What I did was open the equipment profile manage, select the profile for the scope using the ASCOM driver, in the camera tab selected the ZWO native driver then change the profile name by adding “native” to the end and then save it. It will save it as a new profile with everything else already set up.
Thanks for the followup. I didn’t see Nativeas an option, so need to install that. But I upped the limit from 40% to 70% and got three hours of 90 second subs in 3h, 8m, so download went well. However, I missed my target (Pelican) by a mile, or at least a few arc minutes… Need to work on target acquisition now.