Hi all, I have a rather strange issue with my DSI Pro II color and Envisage when trying to capture darks and I apologize in advance if this is a bit lengthy. I stumbled on to this forum after doing some web searching on my issue, hopefully someone on here will have a solution.
First, I've had my DSI Pro IIc for about 4 months, still a novice in all respects to AP, but I have a strong background in computers. I've recently started autoguiding and with that of course comes long exposures and now I definitely need to take advantage of darks, as my images are littered with hot pixels, etc after several seconds of exposure time.
The last several nights in a row I have been attempting to save darks with no success. This is what happens: I select "Take Darks" from the image process box, set up my first and last exposure durations appropriate for the shots I'm working on, and hit start. It then of course prompts me to cover the objective, and after hitting ok it begins going through the exposures. As it completes the exposure process, I get prompted with "No Darks Found - Select [Take Darks] from the [Image Process] drop down to create Darks", and then I get a third prompt telling me to uncover the objective. The "Image Process" drop down has now defaulted to "Deep Sky" as it is supposed to. However, there are no darks saved anywhere, and the "Dark Sub" box does not become checked as it's supposed to. When I try to manually click it, I am prompted again to select "Take Darks" from the image process drop down to create darks.
I have checked save file directories, and no darks are ever saved. I have scanned my drives to make sure they weren't going somewhere else by some odd chance, and none to be found. I was originally running Envisage 5.2, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it and Autostar Suite. I have tried removing and downloading the updated versions of both from the Meade site (7.02 for Envisage). This also didn't change anything. I went as far as to format and reload my laptop (Sony Vaio 1.8GHz Intel P4 Core Duo, Win XP MCE, 1GB RAM, 60GB free drive space). I even tried another laptop of mine (Dell Inspiron 2.0Ghz Core Duo, Win XP Pro SP2 & Vista [seperate boot partitions] 4GB RAM, 100GB free drive space) and have the exact same issue. I tried changing save directories, I even tried directing the files to a bogus directory, all gives the same result.
A couple details worth noting, when I first bought my DSI and was familiarizing myself with how it functions, it did in fact take and save darks successfully. Between that time and now, nothing changed on my system at all, hardware or software, as it is a dedicated spare machine I've been using for AP. There is really nothing else loaded on the system other than PHD guiding, the typical graphics editing applications, and all of my system patches from Microsoft Updates. The DSI is not modified in any way, and it's babied just like the rest of my scope equipment. It does successfully take color and mono images in any of the available file formats and any exposure time I select just fine. Why it will not take darks is beyond me. It almost seems like the software is trying to select the "Dark Sub" check box before it is even finished capturing dark exposures.
Help!
Thanks,
Josh