SharpCap Forums

Hi, my approach is to fix a piece of transulcent plastic over the top of the telescope to diffuse the sunlight and take the flats that way. You could use the inner bag of a breakfast cereal packet (after cleaning it of the dust!) or some notebooks have a translucent cover over the front page which c...

Hi Geoff, sorry to hear of more missing parts - I am going to look at some ways to try to improve the auto-alignment accuracy (possibly add a second phase that measures over a larger movement distance once the current initial alignment has produced a roughly right result). I'm also very much in favo...

Hi, did you by any chance use the latest update of SharpCap that allows you to set a hot/cold pixel correction level as well as using a dark frame? My goal with adding that ability was to address the sort of issue in this thread of 'rogue' hot pixels showing up in the light frames that are not in th...

Hi John, yes, this is a limitation of the version of the Hubo ASCOM driver that you are using - it only allows tracking to be turned on or off, not the rate to be selected. I'm told that there is a new version available from Rainbox Astro that resolves this issue (see this thread : https://forums.sh...

Hi, yes, that's the way SharpCap works - by default it will take images continuously from the camera and display them on screen as each new image is taken. This is fine in most cases, but not so good for cameras with a physical shutter! As you have discovered, pressing the 'Live View' button to togg...

Hi, yes, you are right - there is only very limited support for 32 bit depths in SharpCap - some internal live stacking data is held that way and you can save the live stack state as 32 bit. I'm certainly not planning to add full 32-bit support, as it would involve a lot of effort making many image ...

Hi, saw your post on facebook too - still wondering if you were trying to use the 3.3 degrees per second movement rate for the spiral search, which wouldn't work well (due to time the mount takes to speed up to - or stop from - such a high speed). I would suggest trying with speeds in the range 8x t...

Hi Roger, the first thing to check is that you have ticked the 'connected' box in the focus control area in SharpCap to tell SharpCap to connect to the focuser - the fact that you are not seeing the position would be an unusual error if you have connected without problems. If that's not it, then che...

Hi Mike, what mount do you have? There are a few mounts that where the ASCOM driver doesn't give SharpCap the option of choosing the tracking rate out of solar/lunar/sidereal - that might be the problem. If you have an iOptron mount then please try updating to the very latest SharpCap 4.1 from our d...

Hi Niels, yes, you are correct in your reading of the capture settings files - you had quite a strong stretch in the 'dark' file, which looks like it made you adjust the gain downwards from 315 to 143, leading to the dark images. I quite like the idea of a warning about the stretch being on - perhap...