Anyone else using the Canon m50 Mirrorless or MKII?

5 replies254 views
kalax avatar
I have been using this camera for astrophoto for a few months and am having persistant problems with the camera freezing.

My setup is 
WO ZS73
Canon m50
AM5

Using NINA.

The freezing seems to happen at random. I will have a sequence of photographs being taken and NINA will just get stuck, with the spinning icon. I cannot disconnect the camera from nina without killing the program. Sometimes that is enough and I can reconnect to the camera, but most often the camera is frozen, it will not even power off, I am forced to remove the battery.

I have tried a few things, removing the SD card, new and fancy USB cable, but to no avail.

Hoping someone out there can help, I can't quite afford an astro camera yet.

thanks
randcpoll avatar
I have used a modified M50 quite a bit and never have had a problem. However, I use APT for my acquisitions, not NINA.
Well Written
andrea tasselli avatar
As above, use APT not NINA. I had similar issues with my Nikons with NINA in the past.
Daniel Vancura avatar
Oddly enough, I’ve noticed similar issues on the R7 when connected to my ASIAIR. My impression is that it reproduces most notably when I overexpose the image, such as accidentally taking a flat frame in light frame duration. Doesn’t help that the ASIAIR can’t manage to actually set exposure times fast enough for flat frames on the R7, so doing those and biases manually is my workaround there. Other than that I think I’ve seen it with shorter exposures in succession, “fix” being to just give it 2 or 3 second delay between frames.

No idea about NINA, just saying I’ve seen similar things on Canon 🙂
Helpful
GalacticRAVE avatar
what driver are you using. I occasionally had similar problems with my Canon EOS Ra and the Canon driver. Have you tried the ASCOM driver for DSLR - works much more reliably in my case. Matthias
Helpful Concise
Tony Gondola avatar
It really sounds like a driver or camera issue, NINA is pretty solid. Are you using the ASCOM driver? Is the camera trying to do an automatic noise reduction between frames?
Helpful Concise
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