QHY183M & QHY183C

Before using software, make sure you have connected the cooling camera to the 12V power supply and connected it to the computer with a USB3.0 data cable. If it’s an uncooled camera, 12V power is not needed. We recommend 64-bit Software, like SharpCAP x64 , N.I.N.A x64. etc., especially when you’re using 16bit cameras.

Launch SharpCap. If the software and drivers mentioned above are installed successfully, the video image will appear automatically about 3 seconds after the software loads. You will also see the frame rate in the lower left corner of the software window as shown below.

If you have already started the SharpCap software before connecting the camera, in order to open the camera, click on the “camera” in the menu bar and then select the device.

Offset adjustment. When you completely block the camera (i.e., like taking a dark frame) you may find that the image is not really zero. Sometimes this will reduce the quality of the image contrast. You can get a better dark field by adjusting the offset. You can confirm this by opening the histogram as indicated in the figure below.

If you want to enter the 16-bit image mode, select the “RAW16” mode.

By selecting the “LX” mode you can expand the exposure setting range and take long exposures.

After cooling devices connected to the 12V power supply, the temperature control circuit will be activated. You can control the CMOS temperature by adjusting the settings in the figure below. Basically, you can control the temperature of CMOS by either adjusting “Cooler Power” or clicking “Auto” and setting “Target Temperature”. You can also see the CMOS temperature at the lower-left corner of the software window.

There is a hole in the side of the camera near the front plate that is normally plugged by a screw with an o-ring. If there’s moisture in the CMOS chamber that causes fog, you can connect the desiccant tube to this hole for drying. There would better be some cotton inside to prevent the desiccants from entering the CMOS chamber.

Please note that you may need to prepare desiccants yourself, because for most countries and regions desiccants are prohibited by air transport. Since QHY always deliver your goods by air, sorry that we can’t provide desiccants for you directly.

If you find dust on the CMOS sensor, you can first unscrew the front plate of the cam and then clean the CMOS sensor with a cleaning kit for SLR camera sensors. Because the CMOS sensor has an AR (or AR/IR) coating, you need to be careful when cleaning. This coating can scratch easily so you should not use excessive force when cleaning dust from its surface.

All QHY cooling cameras have built-in heating plates to prevent fogging. However, If the ambient humidity is very high, the optical window of the CMOS chamber may have condensation issues. Then try the following:

1. Avoid directing the camera towards the ground. The density of cold air is greater than of hot air. If the camera is facing down, cold air will be more accessible to the glass, causing it to cool down and fog.

2. Slightly increase the temperature of the CMOS sensor .

3. Check if the heating plate is normally working. If the heating plate is not working, the glass will be very easy to fog, the temperature of the heating plate can reach 65-70 °C in the environment of 25 °C. If it does not reach this, the heating plate may be damaged. Please contact us for maintenance.

Please avoid thermal shock during use. Thermal shock refers to the internal stress that the TE cooler has to withstand due to the thermal expansion and contraction when the temperature of the TEC suddenly rises or falls. Thermal shock may shorten the life of the TEC or even damage it.

Therefore, when you start using the TEC to adjust the CMOS temperature, you should gradually increase the TEC power rather than turning the TEC to maximum power. If the power of the TEC is high before disconnecting the power supply, you should also gradually reduce the power of the TEC and then disconnect the power supply.

For beginner, we recommend that you set the gain to “unit-gain”. Unit-gain is the gain when system gain is 1 (1e/ADU). This number is shown in the table above, like the unit-gain of QHY168C is 10. In fact, increasing or decreasing a bit doesn’t make a big difference.

You could increase or decrease Gain according to the condition. For example, if your optical system is fast, like F2.2 to F5, or long exposure for more than 5 minutes without narrowband filters, then you can decrease GAIN to achieve a higher dynamic range and make better use of full well capacity. By doing so you can avoid overexposure.

If you use narrowband filter on a slow optical system like F6 to F10, or short exposure time, the amount of photons received will be less. In this case you can increase GAIN to make better use of characteristics of low read-out noise in high GAIN value.

There is no fixed “best value” for OFFSET. To set OFFSET, you should take the bias frame and dark frame at a certain GAIN value, then check the histogram of the frames.

The histogram distribution is a peak-like curve. While changing the OFFSET value, the histogram will move left or right. We need to guarantee the range of the whole curve won’t be chopped off at the end. At the same time, we need to keep a little residue on the left side, just over 0 a bit.

Pay attention that under different GAIN values, the width of this peak varies. The higher the GAIN is, the wider the distribution will be. So OFFSET value at low GAIN is not suitable for high GAIN because the curve is easily to be chopped off.

For those CMOS less than native 16-bits, the AD sampling accuracy doesn’t match perfectly with the full well capacity. At low GAIN level, the system gain will be couple electrons per ADU. The camera loses the ability to distinguish the strength of the signal because of such sampling error.

When GAIN increases, the system gain will decrease. However, increasing GAIN will limit the full charge of the well. If the system gain is 1 for a 12bit CMOS camera, the pixel will be saturated at only 4096 electrons (full well). Some bright stars will be easily saturated. This problem goes worse under fast optical system or long exposure. Over saturated objects cannot be fixed during post processing (unless you shrink stars, like in PixInsight). Also, the color saturation of the star will be affected. As result, the stars will be huge and white washed. We should decrease the gain value in this case, to gain a higher full well capacity.

Under long exposure or using fast optical system, the pixel will receive more photons. The variation of quantized noise from the photon which you can consider as natural dithering of the light intensity, will be greater than the “noise” from the sampling error. Therefore, the effect of the sampling error will diminish. By averaging multiple exposures, this will compensate the lack of depth of the picture because of the sampling error.

If the number of received photons is limited, like using narrowband filters or short exposures, we can increase the GAIN value. It is because the stars will not be easily saturated. At the same time, we limit the noise from the background cosmic radiation. Under this condition, the readout noise and quantized noise are the major factors that affect the ability to distinguish dim light or objects. By increasing the GAIN value in order to decrease the readout noise and quantized noise from sampling error, this would greatly increase the signal to noise ratio.

But for DSO capture, You should keep the offset above zero and avoid the background is cut off. A background from 1000-5000 is a good value(16bit mode) for DSO imaging.