Solved - Moravian G3 16200 light banding when using SGPro

[Manav08]

Hi everyone - I purchased SGpro and was hoping to get it to work with my Moravian G3 16200 camera.

Unfortunately, when taking test images with SGpro I get light banding on top of the image (see image testSGpro.fits). Please note I’m using the 32bit ASCOM driver 4.6

However, when I use the proprietary SIPS v3.14.3 (64bit, x64) I don’t get the same issue (see image testSIPS.fits).

Both images are 10sec exposures (with lens cap on) and can be accessed by clicking here

Please help me.

Regards
Yugant

[joelshort]

I’m not sure what the problem is, but I am using older drivers without issue. If you want to try these, here are links to download the older drivers I am using (note these are windows 10 drivers):
GX_ASCOM_32bit_3.8

GX_SystemDrivers_2.3.1.0

[Manav08]

Thanks Joel - Are the ASCOM drivers 32bit version 3.8 for ASCOM platform 6.4? If so I’ll test them out tomorrow; its sleep time at the moment.

I will leave the system drivers as-is because SGPro from my understanding only uses the ASCOM drivers. (I don’t want to break SIPS functionality)

I hope this works cause SGPro is cake compared to SIPS

Regards
Yugant

[joelshort]

Yes, the ASCOM driver is for 32bit, and I’m using the latest ASCOM 6.4PS1

[bilgebay]

I’m using SGP with the latest drivers and my frames look like this

I have never used SIPS so I have no idea how my frames will look like with it. I have never thought that using this or that software would make any difference with the image quality. As you will notice my frames have lighter edges on the left and right side… but your image with SIPS also has it. This is worth investigating I think. I will try to take some frames with SIPS and see…

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

[Xplode]

Check your Ascom driver settings, after installing the newest driver they are “messed up” after upgrading.
Here’s the settings that i’ve used for over 2 years

[Manav08]

So apparently the preflash setting was the root cause which was picked up by our friend @Xplode.

I have noticed some verticle columns in my darks but they were there in the SIPS frames as well. From what I’ve heard they can be calibrated out.

With the settings changed here is the new image and the FITS file can be downloaded here

Summary

1. The Moravian 16200 should have a reasonable Max. dT so I’ve left it as 3 which is what SIPS defaults to.
2. The cooling time and warm-up time have been set to 6mins to slowly cool to -20 or return to ambient.
3. Preflash is 0 and Num Clear is 1 (not that it matters if its 1 or 2 since preflash is 0)
4. The banding on left and right of frame is expected behavior from all Moravian G3 16200. Several owners on cloudy nights have shared the same dark frame characteristics. @bilgebay

[bilgebay]

Thanks for sharing the conclusions!

This is a very nice camera indeed. I love it!

[bilgebay]

You can see my camera control panel settings below:

My camera is maybe one of the earliest units. It has quite a long download time but this is not a big issue for me.

[Manav08]

Ahh I forgot to mention and change the camera gain (e-/ADU) settings as well.

Thanks for sharing that

[HomerPepsi]

Hi @Manav08 and @bilgebay, I can verify that software and drivers play an interesting role in the downloaded image. I posted in a thread about a similar problem awhile back, except the original poster was having troubles with his FLI16200. My camera is a FLI ML8300.

For some reason, the SGP driver gives all my images a strange banding at about 5/8’s to 3/8’s from top going down. At first I posted on cloudy nights and got some suggestions about it being electrical interference, but even ferrite cores did not solve the problem. The ascom driver dev’d by Hartmut over on the yahoo group did. With or without the ferrite cores.

[Manav08]

Hi @HomerPepsi!

I just want to clarify a few things; first of all SGPro doesn’t have specific drivers for cameras. The drivers for each camera utilised are ASCOM drivers i.e. third party drivers using universal standard. If you had used the same drivers in another software there is a good probability the problem would have persisted. For example I have the same banding issue in Nebulosity v4 as well since that too uses the same ASCOM drivers.

The reason I knew the issue wasn’t hardware was because it doesn’t occur when using Moravian Instruments proprietary SIPS software package which uses the 64bit native system drivers for the G3 16200 not ASCOM.

To fix this issue that you are having with the ASCOM drivers for the ML8300; FLI would need to rectify and release a new ASCOM driver. Which is what I assume our friend Jared was attempting to do in the linked thread. But I guess you have a variant driver that’s working (Hartmut’s) so its not all bad.

Second option would be that SGPro starts to support native drivers. Note the ASCOM driver is merely a layer between software like SGPro and the native driver. That’s another conversation…

[HomerPepsi]

Hi @Manav08, I think you misunderstood something in my previous post. The ascom drivers dev’d by the third party (Hartmut) are the drivers that work in SGP without banding.

FLI has a base driver package that is installed, but I do believe Jared and Ken needed to develop a proprietary FLI driver fo use with SGP. Even on your install (without FLI installed), you actually should see the FLI camera driver option (like zwo or Nikon options), where as on my install, I wouldnt see the Morovian camera option without their drivers installed.

And I can verify it is SGP’s implementation of the official driver because using FLI’s proprietary software (which uses the official FLI drivers), the banding is gone.

I believe the problem as stated by @Jared or @Ken was that they didn’t have FLI hardware to test their code with.

[Manav08]

Ahh ok! Makes it clear