Night Sky Cam test with QHY5III178C + 6mm lens
April 7, 2018 - Chris Howard - SaltwaterWitch.com/astronomy
Last night I tested out an inexpensive super-wide-angle 6mm C-mount lens hooked up to my QHY 178 color CMOS camera (without the IR cut filter, which is why the trees are a bit odd looking). I have this cabled to a small Windows 10 box running SharpCap. As you'll see in the video I played a bit with exposure and gain in the beginning before settling on an exposure of 5 seconds, gain of 28, and offset of 8. I still need a few more clear nights to get the dozen or so settings in SharpCap dialed in.
We had some steady high clouds throughout the night, but I still managed to get the Milky Way as it was sweeping up and across the sky. This camera + lens would make a nice all-sky type setup, but I'm thinking about using this to capture the full night sky when we have meteor showers--the Lyrids, Perseids, Geminids. I shot this sequence of images (1400 3 second exposures) from one of the attic windows, facing east. Yes, I just stuck the camera out the window.
My next test is to tie the camera with a long USB3 cable on the end of an 8-foot length of PVC pipe--out the same window--to get it above the roof of the house and get the whole sky in view. Then I can use SharpCap to capture several thousand 5-second frames over the course of the night, and bring them together into another video.
So, there you go. Hope this was helpful. Let me know if you have questions, and definitely check out my site SaltwaterWitch.com. I have a set of astronomy pages with my astro images, my equipment, and a few customization and automation projects.
Clear skies everyone!
