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Subject: [M]: [M] Very OT - Initial impressions on CCDSoft
From: Frank Loch
Reply To: mapug@shore.net
Date: Sun May 25 02:23:36 1997
To All -- Friday May 23, I received CCDSoft and thought it would be
interesting to some of you out there to recount my initial impressions
of this new product.
Todate I have only the installation experience plus one hour image
processing, plus 1 hour imaging experience to draw on here.
For the record, I have been previously using SkyPro, CCDOPS,
Photoshop lite, and Mira AL with my lx200 12" and st7 CCD camera. If
you visit my website you can see 80+ images processed with my previous
software.
First let me say that I feel that CCDSoft is a substancial
improvement over SkyPro. It's nice to have the W95 format and the
somewhat faster 32 bit performance (perceived -- not measured).
A big PLUS -- It will align and add images easily and much faster than
I can do this in Mira AL ( gray scale as well as tri-color combine).
SkyPro will only tri-color combine.
Problems -- Installation was a major headache!!! The manual states
that it needs 2 mb free HD space -- bull! I'm using a Gateway 2000
486DX2 - 66V PC.. I have about 750 MB HD divided up into partitions,
and I wanted to install CCDSoft into the "M" partition. I had 13.4 MB
freee space on my "C" partition where W95 is installed, and 50 MB free
space on my "M" partition. This PC has 16 MB ram.
Initially during installation attempts, the setup wizard (a pretty
dumb wizard here -- I think he lost his magic wand<g>) would lock up
my computer at the 99 to 100% point prior to establishing the initial
setup screen. I have never had this problem with any setup wizard
before.
After trying this several times with the same results, I removed from
"C" partition enough other programs to get to 22.5 MB free space on
"C". Then the setup wizard ran just fine and installation was
successfull.
My last gripe on installation --- After successfull installation, and
after returning to "C" the programs that I had removed (to/from
another partition), I now find that I have only 9.4 MB free space on
"C" even after deleting the TEMP files that CCDSoft needlessly left
there. So CCDSoft has somehow consumed 4MB of my "C" drive. On the "M"
drive CCDSoft used 1.2 MB ( I did not install the DSS part of
CCDSoft).
Imaging -- The Jury is still out on that! I found the new "Focusing
Window" with it's continuously updating 3 focusing sub windows
interesting, but some how I spent 5 times the amount of time focusing
than what I normally do in CCDOPS. Maybe with more experience this
will improve. Now, a big disappointment --- I was not able to get it
to "calibrate" the st7- lx200 combination. Maybe I got brain dead on
this last night, but I just could not get it to do it, nor could I get
it to show a guide star - read "calibration star", although Denebola
was imaging in the normal "Focus" mode.
After an hour of unsuccessfull attempts at "calibration" I switched to
CCDOPS and had calibration success on my first attempt with Deneboila
as I usually do, all within about 2 minutes. I then spent a nice hour
imaging M13 with CCDOPS before the clouds rolled in. I might mention
that I never had much success with SKYPro in calibrating the ST7 -
LX200 either -- so that problem (bug) may still be there --- or I just
can't find the right way to do it!!
I would like to hear others experiences with CCDSoft.
Best regards,
Frank Loch
Try Deep Space 99 at http://www.early.com/~floch/index.html
For Gemstone information try: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/FLoch/