how to capture multi darks in sharpcap to stacks in deep sky stacker.

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The dude
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Joined: Thu Mar 11, 2021 4:07 pm

how to capture multi darks in sharpcap to stacks in deep sky stacker.

#1

Post by The dude »

Frustrated newbie here,

camera setting is raw 16 bit. save as fits file.

1.) How to take multi darks in SC

I have read other posts and it said to take the darks as a regular capture. I have done that, and when I check the sharp cap capture file, they are not there. If I use the SC darks tool, it creates one master dark that will not open. I can see the master dark in FITS avis but thats all I can do with it.

If I find out how to open the master dark, A.) will deep sky stacker be able to stack frames with one master dark? How do I set that in deep sky stacker.

I know deep sky stacker will stack and clean multi darks I did it hundreds of times with my DSLR.

final comment

I think my issue is linked to using the fits file format. If I change to tiff what settings should I use

The dude
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Re: how to capture multi darks in sharpcap to stacks in deep sky stacker.

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

first, the infallible way to locate where your saved images are in SharpCap...

After each capture (either saving a frame in FITS/TIFF/PNG or saving a video in AVI/SER), SharpCap displays a notification bar which tells you where the file was saved.
Capture.JPG
Capture.JPG (34.62 KiB) Viewed 521 times
The blue text in the notification is a clickable link - click on the file name and SharpCap will open that saved file in whatever the default viewer application is for the file type. Click on the folder name a little further to the left and SharpCap will open the folder that the file was saved into in Windows Explorer.

As you've noticed, if you used the 'Capture Dark' functionality in SharpCap you get a master dark - you can certainly use that in DSS - just select one dark and carry on as normal.

If you want to capture multiple darks yourself then capture then using 'Start Capture' and then use the above folder trick to locate them before loading them into DSS.

I would not recommend using TIFF if you have a colour camera - DSS has options to debayer colour images from FITS, but will not do so from TIFF.

cheers,

Robin
The dude
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Mar 11, 2021 4:07 pm

Re: how to capture multi darks in sharpcap to stacks in deep sky stacker.

#3

Post by The dude »

Robin,

Thanks for the response. I have sharp cap set to raw 16 bit and fits but the master dark and master flat was saved as tiff or png. How to I correct that. Will one master dark frame and one master flat frame suffice to assist in noise reduction in dss.

I greatly appreciate your help,

The dude
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Re: how to capture multi darks in sharpcap to stacks in deep sky stacker.

#4

Post by admin »

Hi,

to get the master files saved as FITS, first set your preferred output format to FITS in the settings (https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/3.2/#General%20Tab), and also make sure your SharpCap version is up to date (there have been bugs with this in older versions) - https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/downloads

Because SharpCap captures and averages a number of frames to make the master dark/flat they will be lower noise than any individual dark/flat frame. How much lower depends on how many you capture (capturing 4 frames halves the noise, 16 frames divides it by four, 64 frames divides it by eight). This is just the same improvement that you would see if you captured the separate dark/flat frames and averaged them in DSS.

One word of warning - although many people get great images using the techniques you are proposing (making master darks/flats in SharpCap and using them in DSS), some people encounter problems and find they get better results by doing all the capturing in SharpCap and allowing DSS to do all the processing - ie capture individual darks/flats to file and let DSS make the masters.

cheers,

Robin
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