18th May 2016 iCap/Neximage 5 completely flakey!

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I went out at 11 pm [CET] to have a look at the Moon and Jupiter with the 7" stopped down to 6". With the Skytracker control box still unwell I had the RA motor running straight off the mains. A quick check with a neon test screwdriver proved that there was nothing live about the mounting. The insulation of the wooden telescope rings would have helped to protect the OTA anyway. Interestingly, the computer case produced a nice warm glow!

Both my targets were rather low and there was considerable thermal turbulence. I decided to take a chance and see if I could capture some more videos with the Neximage 5. The thermal agiation and image softness was unbelievable! Expecting anything to come from stacking and processing the videos was probably an exercise in delusion! 

That was when the trouble started. Every time I managed to capture a file the camera would lose interest in living. It would change its settings from Y800 to RGB32 and go offline! I had to keep pulling the USB plug to get it to register the lack of images in "Live" mode. This would put a message on the screen and "Refresh" would then allow the camera to be recognized via "New." Though often this trick would not work and no image appeared on the computer screen. I was using a short [2m] USB extension and tried several others to see if it helped. One would not work at all! Perhaps I need a powered cable? 

Even when I had an image on the screen the usual problem cropped up: It was very difficult to focus with the very high "magnification" provided by the camera in 640x480. Using 4x binning the image scale is still very large and focusing is anything but easy. After I captured each video the camera would promptly turn itself off. So the whole "wake up" palaver had to be gone through yet again. I eve tried setting both boxes to RGB32 but it did not help. Again and again there would be a flash on the screen and a message would come up that despite being "live" no images seemed to be available.

I kept this up for an hour, or more, on the Moon but did not capture a single video of Jupiter. The camera also behaved erratically when I was capturing files of the Mercury transit and sunspots. I was always careful to dress the first cable from the camera along the OTA to avoid any load on the tiny plug in the Neximage 5 camera socket. There does seem to be a signal problem in the present chain. The camera is usually offered [by dealers] with a long, powered USB cable but I dd not bother since I already had so many old USB cables to play with. There is also the matter of being near enough to a computer screen to actually focus manually. If the screen is any more distant there would need to be a powered focuser!

Despite everything this is my very first Lunar image from the Neximage 5 via Registax. The image just above is a single frame from the video and one of the better ones at that. On the computer screen the image was boiling continuously and furiously with frequent totally fuzzy blanks where any focused image was lost completely. Most of the time the limb was completely invisible or an inch wide, multilayered arc. How Registax managed to drag anything from that grey mush is utterly amazing! 

Perhaps the problem is one of not using USB2 [or even USB3] rather than "standard" USB 1.1? That would mean I'd need to add a new USB2 board to my Vista computer. Oh, but I had! But that was around the back and would involve completely reorganizing everything in the pitch dark with a torch held in my teeth.

My main, W10 PC indoors has a couple of USB2 and two USB3 sockets so I could do a camera test indoors without having to move either computer. There remains a question over iCap updates without a continuous Internet connection on the old Vista computer. A laptop would be very useful indoors to allow dual simultaneous browsing while I am using the indoor PC for blogging and image preparation. The problem is the considerable added expense of a laptop to the already considerable astro imaging budget. I'm really not sure a tablet has any relevance to my kind of imaging.

Testing with the newly purchased USB 2 cables proved that the difficulties lay with the supplied USB cable. The plug seems to be quite loose on the Neximage 5's own mini-USB socket. I tried a 2 meter USB 2 to mini USB 2 and then added a 3 meter USB2 adapter/extension cable. [Male to female.] Both systems worked flawlessly with the Neximage 5 using iCap2.3 on both computers. I can only presume that the supplied cable was interrupting the signal from the camera via the 1.1 sockets on the old front panel. Though it never occurred to me at the time. I certainly shan't make that mistake again!

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