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Live stacking toofew stars

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2020 7:05 pm
by Gamewarden
Folks

I am relatively new to astronomy. I use a 6SE with zwo 225 camera, .63 reducer,CPWI and Sharpcap Pro.

I am having trouble getting enough stars to perform a live stack with this small chip camera. I am adjusting the noise, black level and star width but everytime I am working on a image I struggle to get enough stars. I am usually getting the bare minimum of 3. I do try to use the yellow boxes to visually determine which stars I have and adjust the different levels to get more and space out.

Any thoughts. I also try and adjust the exposure and gain to pick up more stars also.

Re: Live stacking toofew stars

Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2020 11:11 pm
by admin
Hi,

If you can see stars clearly in the image, but they aren't being picked up then it may be the star detection settings that need further adjustment (but do make sure that you are not using the image stretch functions in the mini histogram on the right-hand side – these can make stars appear nicely on screen by stretching them dimmer parts of the image, but will not help the stars be detected by the live stacking algorithms). If you find it hard to see the stars and in the individual frames yourself then turning up the gain and/or exposure is probably the best place to start.

If you are still having problems, then capture a single frame to PNG or JPEG format and share it here – we can then have a look and see if we can offer any more specific advice.

Cheers, Robin

Re: Live stacking toofew stars

Posted: Sat May 09, 2020 10:37 am
by Lulu105
I face same issue using a c14

I can open a new discussion but why can’t we select less than 10 stars? It really create lot of troubles in some sky areas where stars are very few....
Can’t you manage a beta version where we select from 1 to 15 the numbers of stars?

Re: Live stacking toofew stars

Posted: Sat May 09, 2020 6:52 pm
by admin
Hi,

at an absolute minimum 3 stars are needed for alignment, but it will be more reliable with more.

Cheers,
Robin

Re: Live stacking toofew stars

Posted: Sat May 09, 2020 10:12 pm
by Lulu105
Indeed

Can you manage a beta version with only 3 stars?