Handbook for the SXVF-H9 Issue 1 May 2007
Starlight Xpress Ltd
SXVF-H9 ExView‘Megapixel’USB
CCD camera user manual
Thank you for purchasing a Starlight Xpress CCD camera. We hope that you will be very satisfied with the results.
The SXVF-H9 is an advanced, very high-resolution cooled CCD camera, especially designed for astronomical imaging. It is a second generation version of the very popular HX916 and incorporates many substantial improvements and extra features. These include a built-in, fully programmable, USB 2 super-fast computer interface (USB 1.1 compatible), an optional add-on autoguider output and integrated dual serial ports for filter wheel and telescope control. The SXVF-H9 uses a Sony ICX285 ‘ExView’ progressive scan CCD, with 1392 x 1040 x 6 .45uM pixels in a 8.98 x 6.71mm active area. ExView devices have excellent quantum efficiency, with a broad spectral response peaking at around 65% in the green, and an extremely low dark current, well below that of any comparable CCD currently available. While this device has an excellent blue light sensitivity, it also has a strong infra-red response, which makes it ideal for all aspects of both planetary and deep-sky imaging, especially with an H-alpha filter.
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Handbook for the SXVF-H9 Issue 1 May 2007
The SXVF-H9 is also the first high-performance astronomical camera to take advantage of a super high-speed USB 2 computer connection. The USB 2 connection offers a download speed increase of about 30x that of the original USB 1.1 interface supplied with the HX916. The full-frame download time is approximately 0.6 seconds and binned 4x4 downloads take only 0.1 seconds, so finding and centring are very quick and easy in this mode.
Please take a few minutes to study the contents of this manual, which will help you to get the camera into operation quickly and without problems. I am sure that you want to see some results as soon as possible, so please move on to the ‘Quick Start’ section, which follows. A more detailed description of imaging techniques will be found in a later part of this manual.
‘Quick Starting’ your SXVF-H9 system
In the shipping container you will find the following items:
1)The SXVF-H9 camera head.
2)A power supply module.
3)A USB camera cable.
4)An adaptor for 1.25” drawtubes.
5)An adaptor for 2” drawtubes and M42 Pentax thread l enses.
6)A disk with the SXVF-H9 control software.
7)This manual.
Optional extra items include:
1)A serial port adaptor and cable.
2)A guider output to guider port lead.
3)An add-on guide camera head (includes items 1 and 2).
You will also need a PC computer with Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000 or Windows XP/Vista installed (NOT Windows 95 or NT4). This machine must have at least one USB 2.0 port available and at least 256 Megs of memory. If you intend to view the finished images on its screen, then you will also need a graphics card capable of displaying an image with a minimum of 1024 x 768 pixels and 65,000 colours. A medium specification Pentium with between 1GHz and 4GHz processor speed is ideal. USB 2 PCI cards are readily available for upgrading a USB 1.1 machine, if you want to achieve the best possible performance. Please note that USB 2.0 operates at a very high speed and cannot operate over very long cables. Five metres of good quality cable is the maximum normally possible without boosters or extra powered hubs.
Installing the USB system:
First, find a free USB socket on your PC and plug in the USB cable. If you do not have a USB capable computer, it is normally possible to install a USB 2 card into an expansion slot. Please note that it may be necessary to enable your USB system in the computer BIOS (the SETUP menu which can usually be accessed at start-up). Many
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BIOS systems have the ability to disable ‘Plug and Play’ devices, such as the USB ports, so please make sure that these are enabled.
The next operation is to run the USB installer from the CD ROM provided. Insert the CD into the computer and run the ‘InstallSXV’ file which is found in the SXVF-H9 directory. This will install the following files (the name of the inf file may vary):
1)‘SXVIO_H9_119.inf’ in C:\Windows\Inf\
2)‘Generic.sys and ‘SXVIO.sys’ in C:\Windows\System32 \Drivers\
If you cannot see the directories ‘C:\Windows\Inf’ and ‘Windows\System32\Drivers’, this will be due to the setup of your Windows Explorer software. In this case, go to the ‘Tools’ menu, followed by ‘Folder Options’ and select ‘View’. Now select ‘Show hidden files and folders’ and make sure that the ‘H ide file extensions for known file types’ and ‘Hide protected operating system files’ check boxes are NOT checked. After this, the various directories and files should be visible.
It is now time to set up the USB device. Plug the USB cable into the camera and observe the computer screen. After a brief delay, you should see an information box, which reports that the computer is ‘Installing a Starlight Xpress CCD camera’. If all is well, the cycle will complete within a couple of seconds, but it is possible that you may have to prompt the system with the location of the SXVIO.sys file (Windows\System32\Drivers). After another brief delay, the computer should say that it has found a new USB2.0 device and is installing a ‘Starlight Xpress USB 2.0 SXVH9 camera’. In some cases the installation will halt after the first stage and you will need to restart the machine, or unplug and re-plug the USB lead to initiate the second step.
At the end of this process, the USB interface will be installed as an ‘BlockIOClass device’ and the camera software will be able to access it. You can confirm that the installation is complete by checking the status of the USB devices in the Windows ‘Device Manager’ (see above). Start up the Windows ‘Control Panel’ and select
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‘System’. Now click on the tab labelled ‘Device Man ager’ and all of the system devices will be displayed in a list (see above). If the installation is successful, there will be a diamond shaped symbol labelled ‘BlockIOClass’ and clicking on the ‘+’ sign will reveal it to be a ‘Starlight Xpress USB 2.0 SXV-H9 BlockIO camera driver’. If this device is faulty, try clicking on it and selecting ‘properties’ and then ‘update driver’. Following the on screen instructions will allow you to re-select the correct inf file (SXVIO_H9_119.inf) and driver file (SXVIO.sys), which should fix the problem.
Adding the camera control software:
Now that the USB system is installed, the camera control program can be used to operate your SXVF-H9. Copy the camera software files from the CD and paste them into a suitable directory, such as ‘SXVH9’ on your computer’s C: drive. Your directory should contain the files SXV_H9.exe, SXV_H9.hlp, bwcc32.dll and wsc32.dll
Connecting the camera:
The camera rear panel
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Connect up the power supply and switch it on. You can start the ‘SXV_H9’ software by double clicking on the icon and you should see the main menu and image panel appear. If the USB connection is OK, a message box will inform you of the ‘Handle’ number for the SXVIO interface and various other version details etc. The main program window will now be seen.
If you press the ‘Camera’ button at the top left, t he program will warn you that the ‘Program Defaults’ have not been set, but pressing ‘OK’ will allow you to continue. The camera default settings are not important for current purposes and may be left as the software start-up values for now, but the warning message may be removed by selecting ‘Set program defaults’ from the ‘File’ me nu and then saving the defaults window by pressing the ‘Save changes’ button. Once the camera control panel is seen, you are all set to take your first images!
Recording your first image:
We now have the camera and computer set up to take pictures, but an optical system is needed to project an image onto the CCD surface. You could use your telescope, but this introduces additional complications, which are best avoided at this early stage. There are two simple options, at least one of which, is available to everyone:
1)Attach a standard ‘M42’ SLR camera lens to the SXVF -H9, using the 25mm spacer to achieve the correct focal distance.
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Or
2)Create a ‘Pin hole’ lens by sticking a sheet of alu minium baking foil over the end of the 1.25” adaptor and pricking its centre with a small pin.
If you use a normal lens, then stop it down to the smallest aperture number possible (usually F22) as this will minimise focus problems and keep the light level reasonable for daytime testing. The pin hole needs no such adjustments and will work immediately, although somewhat fuzzily.
Point the camera + lens or pinhole towards a well-lit and clearly defined object some distance away. Now enter the ‘File’ menu in the SXV _H9 software and click on ‘SX camera interface’. Select an exposure time of 0.1 seconds and press ‘Take Photo’.
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After the exposure and download have completed (about 4 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.
Various other exposure options are available, as can be seen in the picture above. For example, you can ‘Bin’ the download 2x2, or more, t o achieve greater sensitivity and faster download, or enable ‘Continuous mode’ to see a steady stream of images.
‘Focus mode’ downloads a 128 x 128 segment of the i mage 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 d esired 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.
If you cannot record any kind of image, please check the following points:
1)Ensure that the power indicator lamp is on and that the cables are properly home in their sockets.
2)If the screen is completely white, the camera may be greatly overexposed. Try a shorter exposure time, or stop down your lens. See if covering the lens causes the image to darken.
3)If the USB did not initialise properly, the camera start-up screen will tell you that the connection is defective. Try switching off the power supply and unplugging the
USB cable. Now turn the power supply on and plug in the USB cable. This will reload the USB software and may fix the problem after restarting the SXV_H9 program. Otherwise, check the device driver status, as previously described, and re-install any drivers which appear to be defective.
4)If you cannot find any way of making the camera work, please try using it with another computer. This will confirm that the camera is OK, or faulty, and you can
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then decide how to proceed. Our guarantee ensures that any electrical faults are corrected quickly and at no cost to the customer.
Image enhancements:
Your first image may be satisfactory, but it is unlikely to be as clear and sharp as it could be. Improved focusing and exposure selection may correct these shortcomings, and you may like to try them before applying any image enhancement with the software. However, there will come a point when you say, “That’s the best that I can get” and you will want to experiment with the effec ts of image processing. In the case of daylight images, the processing options are many, but there are few that will improve the picture in a useful way. The most useful of these are the ‘Normal Contrast Stretch’ and the ‘High Pass Low Power’ fil ter. The high pass filter gives a moderate improvement in the image sharpness, and this can be very effective on daylight images.
Too much high pass filtering results in dark borders around well-defined features and will increase the noise in an image to unacceptable levels, but the Low Power filter is close to optimum and gives a nicely sharpened picture, as above.
The ‘Contrast’ routines are used to brighten (or du ll) the image highlights and shadows. A ‘Normal’ stretch is a simple linear oper ation, where two pointers (the ‘black’ and ‘white’ limits) can be set at either si de of the image histogram and used to define new start and end points. The image data is then mathematically modified so that any pixels that are to the left of the ‘black’ pointer are set to black and any pixels to the right of the ‘white’ pointer are set to whit e. The pixels with values between the pointers are modified to fit the new brightness distribution. Try experimenting with the pointer positions until the image has a pleasing brightness and ‘crispness’.
At this point, you will have a working knowledge of how to take and process an SXVF-H9 image. It is time to move on to astronomical imaging, which has its own, unique, set of problems!
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Astronomical Imaging with the SXVF-H9
1) Getting the image onto the CCD:
It is fairly easy to find the correct focus setting for the camera when using a standard SLR lens, but quite a different matter when the SXVF-H9 is attached to a telescope! The problem is that most telescopes have a large range of focus adjustment and the CCD needs to be quite close to the correct position before you can discern details well enough to optimise the focus setting. An additional complication is the need to add various accessories between the camera and telescope in order that the image scale is suitable for the subject being imaged and (sometimes) to include a ‘flip mirror’ finder unit for visual object location.
A simple, but invaluable device, is the ‘par-focal eyepiece’. This is an eyepiece in which the field stop is located at the same distance from the barrel end, as the CCD is from the camera barrel end.
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When the par-focal eyepiece is fitted into the telescope drawtube, you can adjust the focus until the view is sharply defined and the object of interest is close to the field centre. On removing the eyepiece and fitting the CCD camera, the CCD will be very close to the focal plane of the telescope and should record the stars etc. well enough for the focus to be trimmed to its optimum setting
Several astronomical stores sell par-focal eyepieces, but you can also make your own with a minimum of materials and an unwanted Kellner or Plossl ocular.
Just measure a distance of 22mm from the field stop of the eyepiece (equivalent to the CCD to adaptor flange distance of the camera) and make an extension tube to set the field stop at this distance from the drawtube end. Cut-down 35mm film cassette containers are a convenient diameter for making the spacer tube and may be split to adjust their diameter to fit the drawtube.
Another popular solution to the ‘find and focus’ pr oblem is the ‘flip mirror’ unit. These operate on a similar principle to the single lens reflex camera, where a hinged mirror can drop into the light path and reflect the image through 90 degrees into a viewing eyepiece.
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