Beginners guide to setting up and using ASCOM to control your astrophotography gear - Part One
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 เม.ย. 2020
- In this video i go through the basics of installing ASCOM and other astrophotography software.
This video is very much aimed at beginners.
Check out part two of the video to see how to use and configure various ASCOM components.
• Beginners guide to set...
Links to downloads
ASCOM
ascom-standards.org/
Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework SP1
www.microsoft.com/en-gb/downl...
EQMOD
eq-mod.sourceforge.net/
SharpCap
www.sharpcap.co.uk/
Stellarium
stellarium.org/release/2019/1...
PHD2
openphdguiding.org/
Astrophotography Tool (APT)
astrophotography.app/download...
All Sky Plate Solver
www.astrogb.com/astrogb/All_Sk...
Platesolve 2
pw-ecommerce.com/software/
#ascom #astrophotography #thenightsky #phd2 #apt #zwo
You can contact me using
Twitter: @hogarthUK
Discord: hogarth#6881
Email: youtube@alien10.com
I'm always open to providing impartial and fair product reviews - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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Finally a tutorial video that provided information that this raw beginner, who hasn't used the Window format in years, could use. This has been just what I have been looking for. Thank you from this new subscriber.
As a guy loves astrophotography but has early onset dementia, Nice clear detailed explanations. Yes I replayed your vid many times but I think I have a chance to get back to astrophotography
Hey Constantine, your comments really have moved me, thank you so much and I hope your illness doesn’t get any worse and you can get outside and enjoy this great hobby,
ASCOM needs to add this vid and your name to the credits. Thanks for this.
appreciate the comments.. Thanjs
Thank you! I spent a lot of money on all this equipment and am having a difficult time getting it to run. You just threw me a lifesaver with this instruction video. On to part two now.
Great, straightforward & easy to follow tutorial.
After several years of visual astronomy I've decided to try my hand at AP & the learning curve is very steep with so much to try & understand (appropriate kit, correct procedures, post processing etc to name just a few things) I'd been putting off trying to get my head around ASCOM which I saw as just another thing to learn (but not essential). After watching your 2 videos I've realised it will actually make the whole proccess 'easier' rather than just adding more information overload. I feel much more confident using it now. Thank you. Btw I've subscribed to your channel.
Extremely useful information, wish I had seen this a month ago its all clear now. Thanks, much appreciated.
Thank you SO much for this great tutorial!!! I'm setting up my third AP laptop this morning (long story...). Although I've stubbled through the process by piecing together information from various videos having it all together like this is FABULOUS!!!
I guess I'm kinda off topic but does anyone know a good site to watch new movies online?
Amazing - this was just what I needed in my journey from short exposure to guided long exposures. Still tons to figure out but this is looks like a huge help.
Thanks for the feedback Mark, I really do appreciate it
Very Very enjoyable. thank you so much for the entire process. I downloaded everything you downloaded. Now I will watch part two
Just what I needed. Brilliant. Thank you very much.
Allen Lloyd thanks, appreciate the comment
Wow! Thanks for the ground up install and explanation. So many YT video producers just assumes you already know some stuff or already have some things installed/configured.
Glad it was helpful!
Great Job! I'm setting up for the first time. Easy to follow and understand.
Thanks Andy for the feedback
Supberb! this is going to be my go to video for astro software download info. I now understand ascom and why I need it.
Leon Corns thanks Leon appreciate the comments
Thanks buddy, this helped me a lot inside this jungle
Finaly a video so clearly explained that i think i am now able to try the setup that is comming. thank you for this. i wil be going thrue this a couple of times. and new sub offcourse
Fantastic videos (P1 & P2) can't wait to try this out once I get my Skwatcher Wifi Unit in a few days
best youtube for connecting your mount to your computer
Superb. Really clearly explained. Thank you!
Glad it was helpful!
Thank You for a very informative Video
Hogarth, thank you for your excellent part1
Many thanks for the feedback, I do appreciate it
@@HogarthsAstrophotography yep, you are good.
@@HogarthsAstrophotography Hogarth, you got stellarium moving my simulated mount to my target via Ascom. Thank you. The simulated ccd is taking photos but shows only noise. But ill continue working to get a decent pic. Thanks.
@@goatsuukerhill great, sounds like your getting there. The built in CCD simulator with Ascom only has one image,(‘Orion from memory’).. there’s a great ascom simulator camera called sky simulator
sourceforge.net/projects/sky-simulator/
What this one does, is reads your mounts position and gets the image of where your pointing at from an online catalog.
@@HogarthsAstrophotography Ah, that explains my shooting fails. Thanks
Very thorough! So many details, and I love it. Maybe in part 2 (or 3 or 4 😂) you could talk about the EQmod driver settings in detail. 🤞
Jeff Horne thanks Jeff, not sure how you preserved with the 360p version of the video... YT hasn’t made the HD version available yet since I uploaded yet..appreciate your words though.. thanks
Hogarth I was aware that it was 360p...but I didn’t want to wait. 😂
@@JeffHorne At last the HD version is showing under the playback cog.
Bedankt
Hey thanks Wim, I do appreciate it
I've always thought that you astronomers have always had big "communication" problems with other human beings, you probably think that all other human beings are born already learned. If in your opinion this is a tutorial for beginners, I, who have been trying to learn for several years, took me 4 hours to understand what you were doing, also because there isn't one of you who has the same settings. Anyway, I'll try to start something, if I succeed I'll thank you.
Thanks... this is very helpful. I would love to see a video about the hardware you use to connecting the equipment in the observatory and your PC in the house. I believe I have seen all of your videos but I have never seen this addressed. I'm just assuming it is WiFi.
Thanks for your comments Katherine, I do appreciate it. Funnily enough I’ve been planning a video showing my NUC and connectivity and hopefully will have it published over the coming weekend.
hi i just watched your video and i am not sure where you found the celestron telescope and mount drivers downloads site.
Thank you very much for this video. I have a Bushnell Nextstar alt az mount. Will ascom work with this mount?
An EQ mount is required for most astrophotography as an alt/az mount will only allow for very short exposures as it won't track the rotation of the sky.
With ASCOM 6.5 SP1 you need dotNET version 4.8
Downloaded framework 3.5 and Ascom still fails to install
I have a windows 10 computer which is the main in the house but when I try to contact to eqmod it cannot find the port to contact to eqmod any ideas thanks
Thanks for the information. Can you discuss what settings you used to define the ASCOM simulated camera and scope in order to get the plate solving to work? I’ve tried to plate solve using the simulated setup and I can’t get it to work.
Hello.. its not the built in ascom camera simulator. Its a 3rd party one hosted on sourceforge.
dead easy to setup.. it basically uses an online database to get the images every few seconds based on where your virtual scope is pointing, download the image and presents that back to ascom, so hey presto, you get a pic of that location in the sky. Limitations. its a fixed focal length
sourceforge.net/projects/sky-simulator/
@@HogarthsAstrophotography Thanks for the reply. I understand what you pointed out. I have set up the sky-simulator without problem. When I present the images that the sky- simulator returns to the plate solver the solving fails. I've tried this from both APT and in the stand alone solver programs. My guess is that the focal length and the Camera parameters (chip size, pixel size) aren't correct. So what I'm asking is what parameters are you feeding the plate solver that works?
Thanks for your help.
@@davidspital997 So ive rebuilt the environment i used, as i'd torn it down.
I got it to platesolve straight away in APT. But I can see it was using PlateSolve2 with both the APM and UCAC3 catalogs installed and I had to do a near plate-solve, ie. in PointCraft, hit the scope pos button and then press solve. Focal length of camera was set at 1000 and i used the default SkySim camera properties of 5.60 microns pixel size and 15.8 x 11.9 sensor size. Hope this helps
Trying to see if I can get blind solving done via ASTAP.
UPDATE: So i got it working doing a Blind Platesolve using ASTAP too.
What i had to do was basically only have ASTAP configured in PointCraft and as long as you have the G17 catalog installed in the same folder, it worked.
But as soon as i told APT, heres PlateSolve2 or ASPS, got issues trying to blind solve an image
@@HogarthsAstrophotography Thank you for your effort and the info. I will give it a try.
Best David.
So using your suggested parameters for the simulation plate-solving things have started to work! Great help...thank you.
Thank you for your amazing tutorial. I have been trying for several days now with no luck. And actually as per my mount firmware I found that I need Ascom 6.4 or 6.5 versions. Unfortunately I couldn't find them anywhere, so I am stuck again. I am not leaning toward the firmware upgrade route yet. I have the iOptron gem45.
Do you still have Ascom old versions or direct me to any links? Thank you very much.
Also, I would like to mention that I tried Ascom 6.5sp1 but with no luck...
Hey thanks for the feedback Mai.. I do keep all versions for reasons you mentioned above.
I've uploaded Ascom 6.4 and Ascom 6.5SP1 to my OneDrive and shared it out. I'll leave it shared for 7 days for you..
1drv.ms/u/s!AngKJRdEFZbuitQm8Tc9N2RTT6wRtg?e=9QEJvG
Hope this helps
Can't thank you enough.. Much appreciated.
I shall download and retry.
Great video for a beginner. When is part 2 due? Cheers
kedlestongoose soon. Hopefully by the end of the day
Fantastic. Got lots of spare time at present and you are making it very easy to follow - unlike some other instructional videos.
Dear Hogarth. First a big thank you for this tutorial videos. Such a help when getting into astrophotography with all these software options.
If I may: I set up practically all the software as shown in your 2 tutorials. Mostly without problems. What dos not work is the ASCOM simulation camera. It works when I have my DSLR attached producing an image. But the simulation produces just a gray image, not the stars the mount points to. At the beginning I had the Orion Nebula showing but I figured out that came form a subfolder. I have chosen the CCD: ACOM camera > Camera V3 Simulator > have left all settings as given in the followed window. If I choose the other simulator called simulator, I get a really strong granulated grey image. Does not matter where in Stellarium telescope points to. Any suggestions? I would appreciate your help
Thank you and best regards, Georg
So I think I know what your problem is. The camera Simulators that come with ASCOM only have Orion as a single image, no matter where you point it. and I suspect the other grey image is what the other camera simulator that comes with ascom also shows.
In my video I used a community developed ASCOM camera, that actually goes away and gets the DSO image from an image repository, hence why it worked in my video.
The software is at sourceforge.net/projects/sky-simulator/
@@HogarthsAstrophotography Thank you for your reply and the link. The second ASCOM simulator's shown image, is every time just minuscule different, but different! I will try your suggested software. Again thank you for the incredible helpful tutorials you provided. Clear Skies.
I wanted to report back. After a bit of back and forth it, works!!! YEAHHH. Thank you very much. Next step is to figure out plate solving....
@@georgalbrecht8029 Thanks for letting me know... the real sky sim isnt perfect, but usually is ok.. the lag between downloading and it using the image is usually the only fault.
for platesolving make sure if the tool your using wants to know the focal length, i think 1000mm seems to work from memory
I get the impression that the ascom centrepiece must run on Windows. Is that correct? Or can I use ascom on a linux-only network?
Hello. Unfortunatly, ASCOM is designed around Windows and COM libraries. Linux has an equivilant of ASCOM called INDI
That said, there is something called ASCOM Alpaca which hasn't taken the world by storm yet, but in theory allows ASCOM to be device OS independant across Windows, MAC and Linux, but relies on vendors providing the neccessary driver support.
@@HogarthsAstrophotography
yeah, i've heard about alpaca, but it looks like that also needs one component that only runs on windoze. that is why it is not an option or me. i hate windoze, especially that bloated piece of spyware they call windows 10. guess i'll have to check out that INDI thing then...
Thank you for this helpful video but as a really new beginner it doesn’t tell me how to get my mount to talk to APT ? Help!
Im doing an APT video next...
in the mean time.. what mount do you have and what cabling / connectivity are you using
I have the newest version of the skywatcher EQ6R-Pro, eqmod cable which I was trying to connect from mount HC port to laptop usb. No matter what I try it says connect error
@@canon1shot ok, let’s start with
have you installed Eqmod ? If you do, have you got the com port set to the correct one. If not you need to download and install Eqmod
also check com ports under device manager in windows, when you unplug and plug the cable in, does a com port appear/disappear.
is the Eqmod cable one of the ones with the FTDI chips or old prolific chips (not easy to find out, unless the seller says what it is)
last question. Do you use Discord ? Id be happy to talk to you on Discord and if your happy to share your screen on the laptop, I'd probably be able to spot the issue.. let me know
Thank you for your help, this is so frustrating. Answers... yes I have EQMod loaded, also believe I have all the correct drivers downloaded as well. Yes com port is correct, used the eqmod cable and when it saw that I set that as com port. I tried both 9600 and 115200 baud on the com port and when I went back to change it the port didn’t show so I had to select show hidden. Assume that is a yes to that question but I did not watch it disappear when plug/ unplugging. I have purchased two eqmod cables now, both said they were for EQ6R-Pro, one was the same as another user online that has the same newer version of this mount. I have discord for a group I’m in but have not used it for anything else, I’m not sure how to set that up, but don’t have an issue with doing that. Also use zoom if that helps
P.s., I haven’t had any windows products for many years so that’s probably part of the problem. Do I need to add discord to the laptop I’m using for the mount or are you talking about using chat room features to communicate?
Well I got PhD working about 2 months ago now time to setup and use apt .
I’m doing an APT beginners video soon
Yes that would be a good video . I struggled for 2 months with PhD2 and only after watching your ascom videos did I understand I was missing drivers , my laptop too over 2 hours just to update it first . I’m getting a asi 294 soon and new I needed to familiarize myself with camera control so I will use my canon t6i until I get the Astro camera. Some You tubers neglect to tell us very important information . Push here dummy is for computer literacy compentant
Competent people
Getting a confusing message when I install ascom:- Please use the new device hub instead of platform 5 hubs and there is a strange "path structure" showing which refers to hubs. Not sure how to continue. Thanks
Not to worry. sorted it. Answer is continue with installation
sorry...........i have a celestron cgem mount.