Change default region of interest options

[GammaCassiopeiae]

Greetings,

I just received a ZWO ASI6200MC Pro full-frame camera, an expensive new toy. I bolted it onto the front of my RASA-8 on July 30, waited for the rain to end, and held my breath. One of the test images from "first light" is here (resized to avoid breaking the internet):

http://sharpend.ca/data/resized%20NA%20 ... 00-AOI.jpg

(North America Nebula, 2020-07-30, RASA-8, ASI ZWO6200MC Pro, Bortle 3 skies, 12 min of unfiltered OSC data, live stacked in SharpCap including satellite tracks)

The image uses the area-of-interest / region-of-interest feature in SharpCap to reduce the vast amount of data and because the corners have very bad illumination (vignetting). The RASA-8 has a limited number of optical path connections and I'm going from a full frame sensor size to T2 in a couple of millimeters. From the face of the RASA T2 adapter to the sensor is supposed to be 25mm and the camera's internal back focus is 17.5mm.

The area of interest (capture area) used in the image above was 7176 by 4790. The full frame is 9576 by 6388. The area of interest is thus 75% in each dimension of the full frame. I am therefore using 56% of the pixels. The sample image was processed without using a flat, but I used a software "flat" to even things out.

Given the illumination of the corners of this image, it appears I could go to a bit larger area of interest, but the options seem hard-coded in SharpCap. For example, if I could go to 85% by 85% I would use 72% of the frame, get a bigger field of view, and would probably still have reasonable illumination.

I saw in a ZWO forum that these default areas are not a property of the camera, but are set by the capture software. Is there a way to modify the capture area options to bump up my area (and field of view) in SharpCap?

[admin]

Hi,

absolutely – if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the list of resolutions that are available there should be an entry that says 'Custom…' – Choose that and you can enter your own resolution which will then be saved in the list for next time.

Cheers, Robin

[GammaCassiopeiae]

Thanks Robin!

Now that you mention it... I've seen that "custom" option before. I just didn't see it with this camera because the default list is so long.

This will allow me to experiment to find a good balance between file size, vignetting and field of view.

GammaCassiopeiae


p.s. Sorry about the hundred "out of memory" crash reports... going to the 64 bit version of SharpCap made a huge difference. I also learned the hard way that many USB ports on my computer are limited to USB-2 and only a couple are USB-3. The camera also needs a solid 12V at a decent amperage before it will speak to me, never mind run the cooler. I'm still getting crashes when using all of the camera's pixels (no area of interest and no binning) but I'm not sure of the circumstances.