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If you find yourself at a loose end, indoors, on a long, rainy day you could play with an astro camera and SharpCap. You'll need the whole sky lens which comes free with some of ZWO's cameras. Though they call it a CCTV lens. Presumably for [wide angle] security purposes.Unscrew the 1.25" nosepiece and the "all sky" lens flange screws straight into the front of the camera. [Flash image right.] Doesn't the inside of the ZWO 1.25" nosepiece look shiny? Ought it to get a quick flash of real, matt black paint?
By adjusting the front lens ring you can refocus to different distances. Screw the lens ring outwards enough and you can get closer. To act as a magnifying lens. Fingers as broad as your screen! Though you do need enough light. The Gain and Exposure can be adjusted in SharpCap to suit. Now point the camera for a closeup of what you only thought was solid print. The letter from the bank is now full of holes [and spots.] You can play with frame size, as well, in SharpCap. Handy practice to remind you not to capture "full screen" videos with vast file sizes!
Since you have a computer screen showing you the camera's output you may notice a flicker. By adjusting the exposure time you can make black bars across the image of the screen. They will move at different speeds depending on the exposure setting including harmonics. Come closer with the camera and the true texture of the screen is revealed. Lettering on the screen is now more space than solid pixels. It just shows how easy it is to fool the human eye.
The real reason for my experiments with the camera were in trying to reproduce the translucent mask which I see in H-alpha. These make the camera unusable for solar work. Was the ugly overlay an artifact of solar work? The result of using a particular software [SharpCap] on my Laptop? A cable effect? An optical effect? Or something else entirely? I certainly could see nothing amiss in the indoor images using the CCTV "all sky" lens. I had often wondered if the camera's IR filter was "fried" by the heat of my 6" f/8 refractor with its internal D-ERF.
By the way: As I fired up SharpCap today on the 29th Feb. 2020 I was offered a new version 3.2.
The real reason for my experiments with the camera were in trying to reproduce the translucent mask which I see in H-alpha. These make the camera unusable for solar work. Was the ugly overlay an artifact of solar work? The result of using a particular software [SharpCap] on my Laptop? A cable effect? An optical effect? Or something else entirely? I certainly could see nothing amiss in the indoor images using the CCTV "all sky" lens. I had often wondered if the camera's IR filter was "fried" by the heat of my 6" f/8 refractor with its internal D-ERF.
By the way: As I fired up SharpCap today on the 29th Feb. 2020 I was offered a new version 3.2.
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