seeing-things/track

Re-evaluate default gain/exposure time for tracking with ZWO camera

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While practicing this evening it occurred to me that I was using the default gain and exposure time for the ASI178MC camera, which are 10 and 0.03 seconds respectively. I have no recollection of how I selected those values, and it seems unlikely that they are universally appropriate. Re-evaluate them, perhaps by pointing the camera with guidescope at dark sky and ensuring that the sky background is at least well above the camera's noise floor by comparing with lens cap on and off.

On 30 Jan 2023 I tracked a couple of Cosmos rocket bodies. For one of the passes I wasn’t able to see anything at all in the guidescope preview window, but then after restarting with --zwo-gain=400 I was able to clearly see the target. Gain 400 was probably too high, or at least the background noise was very strong and the computer vision algorithm was detecting noise as objects. I then set the gain to 200 and this seemed to work well.

I confirmed just now using track --help on nix that the default value for zwo-gain is 10.