SharpCap Forums

ASTAP is my preferred platesolver because it is nearly instantaneous. The downside is that it generally prefers to have a bucketload (~20) detected stars. Under some conditions - galactic pole, cirrus... - sync stars can be sparse, especially when things are automated so you don't have the luxury of...

Ok. That's a workable solution - just don't start a "wait until later than" until you're on the same day as the time you care about in the future. A simple "WAIT UNTIL LOCALTIME 00:05" to hold off until after midnight gets me over the boundary.

Thanks,
Mike.

Thanks. Let me try one more test this evening. I think what is happening is as you describe. I start a "wait until later than 01:00" at 23:45. Instead of waiting for one hour and fifteen minutes, the program decides that it is already past the 01:00 that occurred 22 hours and 45 minutes ea...

First, thanks so much for adding the WAIT UNTIL AT LEAST LOCALTIME command. Having it available has significantly simplified the development of night-long scripts to do many time gated occultation observations. Now that the nights are getting longer I'm starting up the scripts before UTC midnight. I...

Thanks so much for conveying the details of your experience. You're absolutely right that I would be better off with longer integrations, but I'm constrained by a mount that doesn't have the best tracking stability and if I take long integrations the image size is dominated by the drift (or windshak...

Attached is another interesting non-converging focus run. This time after I expanded the focus range. Now at one extreme I'm in the regime of "not enough stars". It looks as if the 25's do have an impact on fit convergence because the points outside of the 25 regime seem to have a clear mi...

Thanks for taking the time to diagnose so thoroughly my issues with autofocus. I'm waiting for some poor weather to pass, but once I can get on sky again I'll try expanding the focus range (and experimenting with some of the focus parameters). Right now I use 5 measurement per sample (selecting best...

Thanks for taking a look. The log information is below. I've been happy with the "best" of multiple sample options because of wind-shake and tracking issues, so it's usually one or two of the samples at one focus point that represents the real FWHM for that point. I might try going back to...

Right now, when autofocus does not get a fit by the end of the scan, the focus returns to the starting position (which is a huge improvement over the earlier versions where autofocus just left the focus where it finished). The attached images show a couple of "failed" autofocus runs where ...

Hi Robin,

Thanks so much. Looks like that's 3 for 3 for fixes and useful mods. I'll try everything out when the new Beta posts.

Mike.