Starlight Xpress SXV-M8C - Manual (Page 7)

Handbook for the SXV-M8C Issue 1 Jan 2005
7
After the exposure and download have completed (about 14 seconds) an image of
some kind will appear on the computer monitor. It will probably be poorly focused
and incorrectly exposed, but any sort of image is better than none! In the case of the
pinhole, all that you can experiment with is the exposure time, but a camera lens can
be adjusted for good focus and so you might want to try this to judge the high image
quality that it is possible to achieve. With our adaptor, most lenses come to infinity
focus at about midway through their normal focus adjustment range.
Various other exposure options are available, as can be seen in the picture above. For
example, you can ‘Bin’ the download 2x2, or more, to achieve greater sensitivity and
faster download, or enable ‘Continuous mode’ to see a steady stream of images. The
reason for the two ‘High Resolution’ modes (Progressive or Interlaced) is to enable
both short and long exposures to be made in a format that can be colour converted.
Progressive mode is ideal for use with relatively long ‘deep sky’ images (more than
about 10 seconds), but will not work well for shorter exposures (daylight or
planetary). Planetary shots are made in ‘Interlaced’ mode.
‘Focus mode’ downloads a 128 x 128 segment of the image at high speed. The initial
position of the segment is central to the frame, but can be moved by selecting ‘Focus
frame centre’ in the ‘File’ menu and clicking the desired point with the mouse. The
focus window has an adjustable ‘contrast stretch’, controlled by the 12-16 bit slider.
The image will be ‘normal’ if 16 bits is selected, while setting lower values will
increase the image brightness in inverse proportion. Please note that ONLY 1x1
binned images will decode to colour – the other modes are for focusing and
acquisition only.
If you cannot record any kind of image, please check the following points: