Hey I’m still working on the astrophotography autoguider, sky was clear tonight and I did my first outdoor test. There’s a huge problem. The camera simply isn’t sensitive enough even with exposure times of 3 seconds, there’s simply no stars visible for most of the sky. I can only see the biggest and brightest stars. For the project to work, there should be at least one star visible anywhere I can point it at.
The difference between making an autoguider out of OpenMV and buying a camera meant for autoguiding is that those dedicated cameras are all natively monochrome. I suspect I’m getting like 1/3 of the light hitting the sensor in comparison to those ones.
Is there a way to get rid of the RGB bayer filter in front of the sensor?
OH OH or if you can tell me where to buy a mono sensor for the H7 Plus?! How hard is it to solder one of those at home?
You can test that hypothesis with a global shutter camera. It has no bayer filter. Order one from my store with the fastest shipping and I’ll credit you it free (because you did that awesome writeup).
I thought you got it working however.
Hi, I tried that before it’s actually a common mod, but it’s very hard to do and I ended up destroying a few sensors and the filter glass just shatters very easily, so I wouldn’t recommend this.
EDIT you do get much more light in if that was a question.
I saw a video of some guy doing it with a DSLR.
I have three of these H7 Plus puppies already I can give it a shot and not have a huge loss, I just need to figure out what tool to use for the scratching and maybe buy a microscope or one of those dentist glasses
Thanks for the offer, I really appreciate it. The global shutter sensor will drop the precision of the system by 4x. Right now, with the 5MP sensor, I can say “I don’t know what the hell I am doing but I’m doubling the resolution of entry level devices on the market at half the price”. I’m compensating for my own incompetencies with the higher pixel density.
Also stupidly I 3D printed the guide-scope, using red PETG because it looks sexy matching my RedCat telescope, I think the light pollution and the internal reflections are killing the contrast. I’m going to try again with one that’s off-the-shelf, made of matte-black aluminum like it’s supposed to be.
I got the glass off with an xacto knife but now it’s doing the HW failure assert 
there’s a tiniest chip on the blue bit that my knife caused
Yeah it probably went through the sensor…I’m not sure of this but if the filter is glued, try a heat gun first (just enough to loosen the filter) it might help.