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Using The Stella Cam On The Ritchie Telescope

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Using the Stella Cam on the Ritchie Telescope Do not plug in the electric power until the camera is connected to all its wires ● ● ● You will need an extension cord to get power up to the camera. You may want to tape the camera power supply to a truss tube on the telescope because it has a short lead. The field of view for the Stella Cam in the Ritchie telescope is about 16' by 10'. This is roughly half the field of the 14 mm eyepiece. 1. Prepare the wires and cables for the camera (tape to the truss tubes or whatever), but do not install the camera yet. power supply coax video output cable (BNC connector) video monitor or television with video input 2. Run through the normal telescope startup procedures including an 'offset init' on a known star. 3. Install the Pentax 14 mm eyepiece, focus and center on a known star then zero the focuser readout. 4. Replace the eyepiece with the Stella Cam, connect the power and coax cables and turn it on. 5. Refocus outward until the readout says 12'30' 6. Set the Stella Cam to 8 (i.e. Rapid frame refresh rate, useful while searching), and the gain to about 75% 7. Slew to your chosen celestial object and center it in the field 8. One you have the object centered, change the Stella Cam setting to 256 or 128 as you see fit (i.e. A longer exposure for a more detailed image) and change the gain to a low value of about 10% of the scale. Set the gamma to a low value. 9. Experiment with the exposure time, gain and gamma to get the best image. There is a BNC socket on the little box by the telescope ring. This leads to a coax cable that runs down to the base of the telescope. It is connected to a splitter/amplifier box in the back of the right-hand cabinet. The connections for that splitter are phono jacks. One output from that splitter goes to a monitor in the dome (BNC input jack on the monitor, phono jack for the splitter box). Another goes to a coax cable that leads to a wall socket downstairs in the library and another in the meeting room near the big wall monitor (low on the west wall).