Live Stacking box greyed out -- could not use

Discussions of Electronically Assisted Astronomy using the Live Stacking feature.
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GregL
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Joined: Sun Apr 30, 2017 6:19 pm

Live Stacking box greyed out -- could not use

#1

Post by GregL »

I have been resolving some issues with my tracking and wanted to use Live Stacking to track my drift -- using a well-populated star field. But when I opened LiveStacking, the enabling box was greyed out. I normally run with dark subtraction. Am on an HP mini with AMD Pro A10-3700E (3.5ghz), 8gb main memory and a pair of SSDs.

I am gathering from some of the other threads that there is some sort of conflict between dark subtraction and stacking. I will give it a try without next time the sky clears.

I check resources with task manager and while sometimes Sharpcap can eat the machine -- like when it is doing exposure calculations, generally it runs around 30% and there are no apparent resource shortages. With a dedicated USB3.1 connection and USB maxed, update time is depressingly slow, 3 to 10 times the exposure time.

So -- why could I not use Livestack?
and -- why is it so sluggish?

greg latiak
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Re: Live Stacking box greyed out -- could not use

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

If the alignment box is disabled that's usually because you have the camera in raw mode and you have turned off the debayering option in the controls on the right-hand side. If the image debayering is disabled then alignment cannot proceed.

Cheers, Robin
GregL
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Re: Live Stacking box greyed out -- could not use

#3

Post by GregL »

OK. So I can use live stacking with raw with my mono camera but not my osc... interesting. (I was changing filters yesterday and gave it a try... the option did not disable itself with the mono camera). So its really the debayering that disables it, yes?

thanks,

greg
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Re: Live Stacking box greyed out -- could not use

#4

Post by BlackWikkett »

OSC works very well with Live Stacking. If you use a OSC camera and debayering is off then Live Stacking is disabled.
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Re: Live Stacking box greyed out -- could not use

#5

Post by admin »

Hi, the thing that disables it is having a colour camera, using a raw mode on that camera and having debayering disabled. In those circumstances you would see the Bayer grid pattern on the screen rather than seeing the image in colour. The problem is when the image is in that format is that you can only do alignment in steps of two pixels or multiples of two pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions. If you tried to do alignment by any other amount then you would end up mixing together the signals from different colour pixels and you would never be able to get a proper colour image out at the end of the stacking process. That's why in order to do alignment with a colour camera you must have the debayering option enabled.

Cheers, Robin
GregL
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Re: Live Stacking box greyed out -- could not use

#6

Post by GregL »

Thanks, that makes sense. I had done livestack before with my osc, why I was surprised.

greg
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