SharpCap Forums

Posted: **Sat Jan 27, 2018 12:05 pm**

Hi Robin,

By way of introduction, I am Chair of the AAVSO Exoplanet Section and am interested in using lucky imaging with some of the new CMOS cameras to do exoplanet observations. I and Gabriel Murawski have already been doing some work in this area using SharpCap's Live Stack to capture frames. However, we'd like to pursue the idea of having SharpCap create a capture file after N frames or T exposure time, where N or T are set by the user. I have looked at using SharpCap's scripting to do this, but I don't see any appropriate objects and methods to do this.

Any thoughts on whether adding this option to LiveStack is a possibility, or at least providing scripting objects to allow this? If you want to communicate with my off-Forum to discuss further, my email is: dennis@astrodennis.com.

Thank you.

Dennis Conti
Chair, AAVSO Exoplanet Section

Posted: **Sat Jan 27, 2018 7:41 pm**

Hi Dennis,

thanks for getting in touch - I'm very keen to support this sort of use of SharpCap for scientific observations (in the past SharpCap has been used for things from the NASA observations of occultations of 2014 MU69 to high speed spectroscopy of explosions!). Right now I am hoping to release SharpCap 3.1 in the next week or so, so I am generally only fixing bugs and making very low risk improvements - that means I can't add this sort of functionality to the UI at the moment, but I can make the scripting API easier to use in this area.

If you download the very latest SharpCap 3.1 beta (3.1.4991 or later), then you will find that I've made it easier to control the live stacking using scripting. The following script should give you the building blocks you need for a solution

Code: Select all

import time
SharpCap.LiveStacking.Activate()
while (SharpCap.LiveStacking.IsActive):
	if (SharpCap.LiveStacking.TotalExposure > 10000): 		# 10 seconds
		SharpCap.LiveStacking.SaveFrame(32, 'c:\\test.fits') 	# really should save to a different name each time
		SharpCap.LiveStacking.Reset()
	time.sleep(1)

Simply put, this turns on live stacking and while it remains active it will save the result once the total exposure hits 10 seconds then reset to start again.

Hope this helps,

Robin

Posted: **Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:46 pm**

Thanks, Robin very much. I will give it a try.

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