Mintron setup

Using a Mintron Camera.

	Fristly I open the AstroVideo program.
	Tell the program what camera I am using and what interface etc. Select the Driver tab then either the VFW or wDM. I use WDM as I am using a USB2 DVD EZMaker frame grabber. This is in the drop down menu that opens up.
	Next I tell the software which source to use through the Video tab.
	Select the Image tab. I check the S Video input and use the PAL system. Your system may be different so please check which one you need. Then I set up the camera so that I can see the object that I want to capture. See below for how I set up my camera.
Next I set up the capture routine by doing the following.
	Open Capture/Setup Frames per image: 1 Total images: (I set this to around 1000 for DSO's) Subject ID: Give object a name. Colour Images: I tick this even though I am using a black and white camera. Save to AVI file: I always tick this as it saves all frames in to an AVI file which I find nice and neat compared to many .bmp frames and besides, Registax can understand the AVI file. I leave everything else alone except the Time Lapse (mS): This I set to "2500ms" which is 2 1/2 seconds.

Setting up the Mintron 12V1C EX camera.

	Note the arrow points to the object that can be changed. Mintron Menu. Notice that the camera is set up to integrate X128 frames on camera. This is the cameras longest "exposure" This means that there are 128 frames per image if captured for 2500ms in VideoAstro. Although the camera does output a continuous video stream.
	Here I have set the camera to ELC not ALC. I have found ELC to be easier to setup. I have turned the ELC up full. This way I can always turn it down once I have acquired the object in the night sky.
	In this image you can see I have turned up the AGC (Automatic Gain Control) to its fullest setting. I always turn this down after I have acquired the object I want to image. Once I have set these up the camera image will go dark and start to brighten up. After a couple of minutes the camera is ready for imaging.
	I turned on the Zoom and turned it up to around 3/4 here because I was using a very wide field lens and it was showing the inside of the lens so it looked like I was looking through a tube. Notice the bright dots ? These are the hot pixels. I have yet to find a satisfactory way of getting rid of them.
	Here I have turned off the Zoom and you can now see the "amp glow" in the top left hand corner. Mintron cameras don't like to be covered up for taking dark frames, they tend to adjust themselves so that the dark frames do not match the amp glow across the image. Still looking for a way to get rid of this effect.

I think you will find that the images come from the camera either in just under or over the 2 1/2 seconds for the Mintron 12V1's with it set to accumulate X128 frames. Setting the software to capture 2500ms will get you the next new frame, although I have found that every 45 to 50 frames I seem to get a double star frame. For this reason I always go through the frames in Registax to tell the program not to use those frames when stacking. I will have to try setting it to just under or over the 2500ms to see if I can stop the double star frame coming in every 50 frames or so.

When you set the camera to integrate many frames on camera you will notice that the camera image goes very dark and brightens up over a couple of minutes.

This is something to do with the way Mintron have made the cameras. This is normal and nothing to worry about. Even the newer camera's suffer from this from what I understand.