Using The ASIAIR Pro For Making Flats & Dark Flats

hi everyone i figured i would show you how to make flats darks and dark flats or flat darks whatever you want to say it using the asa air pro i've had a lot of experience with this recently if you've been following me you'll know why and i've got to make a new set anyway because i've got my hyperstar on here i'm kurt zep and you're rushing aster quest one [Music] okay before getting started you'll notice i got a paper bag over this thing i don't know if there's anything you can do with the hyperstar on here because i don't want to take it off and then every night put a dust cover on this so i figured just putting a bag over the dew shield works pretty well if anybody else has anything else please leave it in the comments section all right first off so let me first say that astrophotography tool nina and sharpcap all have these great flat and darks and dark flat makers and all this and they those those programs are really good using the sarah pro it's a little trickier you gotta do a few other things but it's still it's not that much more difficult to do with the asr pro now why not just do it with some of those other programs well a couple of reasons for one thing i'd have to disconnect everything and or i'd have to find a wire to go from here to the computer and so there's a little quirky thing you might want to just do it with asr pro because as i said it's it's just as easy and something else that peter's linkus mentioned that the gain settings on the sharp cap for example aren't the same gain settings as they are with the asr pro but i don't know about that but whatever since you're doing your imaging with the asr pro you may want to make your flats and your support other support frames with the as air pro okay let me run through the settings that i'm going to use for doing flats you want to have the gain setting the same as you took the light frames and for my purposes using the as air 294 i had it set at 120. you also want to have the adu setting in the middle of between really dark and really bright and for my purposes it's around 30 000. give or take 10 000. so anywhere from above 20 to below 40 would should be good for an adu setting and for my exposure you want to have something above two seconds now i've had it i've had flats at 0.5 seconds they came out pretty well but just to keep all the flat guru people off my back i'm gonna recommend go above two seconds and you also i don't know if it's necessary or not but i keep it's really easy to keep the temperature set at whatever you took your light frames at and in my case it was zero degrees celsius for darks obviously you want to have the temperature set at the same time so you took the lights at you want to have the exact exposure time so if you took like 30 second exposures you want the darks to be at 30 seconds and of course you want to have the gain setting the same and for doing these dark flats you want to keep everything the same that you did your flats with only just want to make it totally dark and the dark flats are going to take place and are going to be in place of the bias frame so i'm not going to do bias since i'm going to do dark flats before actually making the flats i figured i'd show you how i make the flats or and how i adjust the brightness on them by the way it's the following night i've decided to do it at nighttime anyways it's much better to do it at nighttime so i don't have any extraneous light coming in so for my uniform light source i'm going to use this drawing board that i purchased you really want to have a nice even surface and for my smaller skull what i used to what i used was a tablet but the tablet of course is much too small to fit over the edge so that's why i use this light board you could purchase that pegasus flat panel that has complete control over the dim settings and all that and it's the cadillac version but it's a little bit pricey this thing works pretty well but when you use this thing it doesn't go as dim as you might need it to go and so you have to do some other stuff one one thing which you can do is you can use this thing which is a white t-shirt i actually put the white t-shirt mounted it onto one of those embroidery rings and this works out pretty well you can just throw it on here like that and you're ready to go you then you just put this thing on here and then you would turn it on and adjust it to your lowest setting low sprite setting now if it's this still may not be dim enough so you'd have to make it dimmer what you can do is you can use a sheet of white paper large white tracing paper is what i got and i just put it in here and i'm good to go and if it's still not dim enough you can just add another sheet to make it dimmer so by doing that you can you can adjust your adu readings and you can adjust your exposure settings to get the your optimal flat set you want okay i think that's all and let's go ahead and i'll make these flats okay folks i'm outside in the garage and it's dark and i'm now going to make my flats so first off it's in the preview window right now and what i'm going to do is i'm going to make sure everything's on and the guy there's no reason for the guide scope to be on so i'll keep that off i don't really need the mount on so i'll leave that off and the focuser i'll turn it on although it's the for the focuser i haven't changed the settings so because you want to leave the focus or the same focus as you had when you were taking your lights okay so now and the game's already set to 120 and i'm gonna do a two second exposure all right and we'll see what it looks like okay that's way way too bright as you can see this you know this yeah here's what the image looks like so one thing we notice here is on the bottom there's a little zero on the bottom left then there's a 32 768 in the middle bottom and then they're over here where there's a small little triangle that says 65 534 those are your values that's your histogram and what it's telling me right now is this thing's up to the maximum adu what we really want is somewhere around 30 000 i said all right so i've got it you know i've got my light panel on to the lowest setting but it's still too bright so now i'm going to put some couple sheets of that tracing paper in between the t-shirt and the light panel okay now we'll try it again and see what we get okay this looks better but you can see where the histogram is still it's still way over to the um it's not quite at sixty five thousand that black triangle is around forty seven thousand and you can see in the right bottom corner it gives you a max min an average and standard so this is still it's the average is reading 63 000 so it's better but it's still not dim enough so i'm going to put another sheet of paper in between okay let's try it again oh that looks good and look where that value is right now it's down to 23 000 that's good it's above 20 below 40. so that's looking pretty good here's the overall image looks pretty good to me all right now we're ready to rock and roll so what we do is you come over to press preview then you go to where it says auto run press the three lines up here and i'm going to change uh i'm going to reset this whole thing so i'm going to press reset process press this and i'm going to press flat okay and we're going to press the exposure to 2 seconds and we're going to have it we're going to make like 20 of them press ok and i'm going to change that name up there i'm not going to call it my last night starting to call it flats or flat flats okay come back here and now we're just going to press the circle again and it's going to make them oops it says auto shutdown progress it's going to go go to home position and turn off the camera and all that no i don't want it to do that that's how i had it set last night so i'm going to make sure this is off and that's off so the asi air is pretty good because it'll tell you if there is something quirky about your setup and and so that i think that's quite nice right here we go and now it's making my flats okay folks the flats are done now since i've got everything all set up for the flats i'm going to turn off the light board turn out all the lights make sure it's totally dark in here and i'm going to take a set of dark flats the dark flats or flat darks once again i don't know how to say it if it's dark flat or flat dark whatever they're going to be the same exact exposure the same exact game the same exact everything is the flats only they're completely dark so let me shut everything off and i'll do it okay i had a little trouble and what happened was the camera has a little red light on it the on off switch and it's not a problem when i had the edge connected up because the camera sits in the back however since the camera sits up where the lens is when i was trying to do the dark flats that red light created light on the screen that the camera was picking up when i was doing the dark flats so i covered it over with black tape the little red led light on the camera with a black tape and now i'm gonna do these flats so i'm going to go back to auto run and we'll check out my settings and everything's gonna call it dark flats and these dark flats i want them to be two seconds and i'm going to do 20 of them okay and here we go [Music] okay those are all set so i did my flats i did my dark flats and if i wanted to do the regular old darks you would just come up here toward and reset the progress and you press darks and change the name the important thing with reg darts is you want to do it the same exposure you did your lights with and i'm not going to do that right now not because i did three minute exposures and i've already done those actually i would probably take my camera off the whole system to do my darks but that's not necessary i could easily do my darks right now with three-minute exposures just make sure everything's totally dark and let it rip but well before i let you go i'll go over that problem that that i didn't know about until after i made the video or started the video so this only seems to be an issue if you're using the hyperstar or rasa where you got the camera mounted in the front end so here's that little light that i'm talking about the on off light i can see it and that was shining on my flat panel when i was taking the flat darks so what i did is i just covered it up with this little piece of electro curl tape and i put it on the front of it front of the little light and that seemed to fix the problem okay well thanks for tuning in i hope you found this enjoyable and we'll see you next time

Channel: AstroQuest1

Views: 4,348

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Id: 4GAGcnb-m3c

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021