Point Grey Chameleon ready for action (clear skies?)

A long time between updates, but the weather has been incredibly awful. Clouds, Clouds, snow, Clouds.

But it was good for indoor activities like learning how to sell on eBay. My comic book sold for $300, and that along with other sales got me up to what I needed to get the Chameleon, a GSO Crayford focuser for my C925, and a nosepiece so that the Chameleon could use the focuser.

Getting the new camera to work was a brief bit of effort. The camera works well with FlyCapture software, also available from Point Grey. I made a mistake of downloading the latest beta of FlyCap, and it acted like a beta version: no video. As soon as I replaced that with the latest stable version everything worked great. The Crayford will give me zero image shift as I focus. Shift was obviously going to be a problem; the few times I tried video at f/20 it was hard to keep the target in the field of view.

Everything about Point Grey was superb. The camera was shipped via Fed Ex box in box in box; it works great, and when I wrote them asking for advice about the missing video their response was fast and professional.

Last night was the first one with the Chameleon under the stars. FlyCapture software is less than adequate, as it crashed repeatedly, and the GUI is clunky (in my opinion). I'm going to start searching for alternatives.