SharpCap Forums

Some encouraging preliminary results! LRGB-GRGB-initial-comparison.jpg In order to get a quick look at what I might expect I used my existing M35 image data that I captured last month in LRGB, and copied the 300 frames captured with the Green filter into a new folder called GasL (stands for Green as...

GRGB - A solution for fat blue stars perhaps.jpg One of the benefits of a monochrome camera is having the ability to explore creative solutions to systemic problems. My William Optics ZenithStar 20th Anniversary Edition OTA has serious problems focusing blue light. You can see it in the right-side ...

Richard,

Make sure you have "auto-stretch" turned on in SharpCap so you can see the changes.

Brian

I agree with Dave. The difference can be seen with 1-second exposures. Just make sure to cover the lens or select a dark filter if you have one available. Make sure to start capturing frames while the cooler is OFF so you can see what that looks like. Then turn ON the cooler. You should immediately ...

Very nice! Incredible FOV and great guiding. I plugged your info into the SNR calculator. I came up with a Total Stack SNR of 9 which is quite good given only 1 hour of integration time. Something to know about how SNR is calculated, M82's surface brightness is an important factor. Galaxies are mode...

the owners of these cameras were just stuck with a bad product

Mine died a slow, tortured death and froze up after working for 10 minutes. Now it doesn't even make a good doorstop

Brian

Hi, Just to be clear "rotate 90 degrees" asks you to unlock the Right Ascension axis and rotate 6 hours. I've attached four snapshots of my telescope as I prepare it for polar alignment using SharpCap. I begin by unlocking the mount's azimuth and pointing the polar axis roughly in the dire...

I just released a new version of the website that generates charts. For this example I selected M81, my William Optics ZenithStar 71, Altair 290M CMOS camera, and Bortle 5 skies. Each chart shows how the image quality changes over a range of exposures given 2.5 hours of total integration time. The f...

Minos, Something like this would be very helpful: SNR Calc useful reports.jpg I remember seeing a similar graph the last time I used SharpCap's Smart Histogram/Brain but it has been a while. I do remember that the graphs were only available at the telescope when you were preparing to image. My graph...

True. Progress would be faster with a greater number of clear nights. We get so few of them that we rush to image rather than experiment. I do have a website for anyone wishing to tinker while it's cloudy. With it you can model your telescope, camera, and seeing conditions, and then see how a target...