The WATEC camera can be controlled with the program watecctrl, installed currently at the m5 machine. By simply executing this command (without any arguments), it prints the currently configured gain and exposure time values as well as reports the temperature of the frontend:
m5:~$ watecctrl gain=200 exp=10 temperature=5.94 m5:~$
The exposure times can be set with the
watecctrl --exp n
command, where n is an integer between 0 to 14, from shortest to longest. Note that these are dimensionless numbers, and the scale is roughly logarithmic (i.e. the value of 0 represents 1/2000 seconds of shutter time while 14 is equivalent to 20 seconds of exposure; approximately 1 second is at the value of 10 and increasing the exp value by one doubles the net exposure time).
The gain value can be altered with
watecctrl --gain m
where m is an integer between 0 and 255. While in ThAr or Flat mode with the spectrograph, set these values to
watecctrl --exp 1 --gain 0.
For regular use, i.e. observe normal star fields, use the setup
watecctrl --exp 8 --gain 255.
If the star field is less dense and/or the mean brightness of stars are less, increase the exposure parameter to 9..11. One can goes up even to 14, but in this case the net exposure time, hence the video update time is going to be ~20 seconds.