Hello,
This is my first post at Sharpcap. Health and happiness to you and your loved ones in these troubled times.
I have dabbled with Sharpcap in the past and played with some other capture SW but I am going to focus my energies on Sharpcap and I bought the premium license. The SW is very powerful.
One thing I am exploring how to do and wondered if anyone knew how? When collimating your SCT on a star in the centre of the FoV, when touching the collimation screws it moves the star from the centre. I have heard some other capture software has the ability to centre the star in this situation. That would be a very welcome if Sharpcap could do that. Does anyone know if it can and indeed how if so?
When trying to nudge my mount with the ASCOM driver Sharpcap always shows the speed at 0X and offers no other speed options other than 0x and it is hit and miss whether it work in nudging the mount. ASCOM is Sitech and mount is a MESU. Does anyone else use the combination?
Best regards, Steve
Keeping collimation star in middle of FoV
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Re: Keeping collimation star in middle of FoV
Hi Steve,
the options that you see for the speeds at which the mount moves depend on the properties and functions that your mount claims that it supports. If you post a full log here (captured after you've attempted to use the mount movement functions) I can have a look to see if I can work out why you don't see any useful options in that drop-down.
There isn't a built-in function designed to keep the collimation star centred, but there is a feature guiding option which I have improved in SharpCap 3.3 (currently in beta). The new version in SharpCap 3.3 has two improvements that might be interesting for you. Firstly it can try to keep something centred in the view by moving the ROI area (providing you are running your camera in ROI mode) rather than by moving the mount. Secondly it now has a tracking mode where it tracks the centre of brightness of the image rather than trying to track image features – this might well work to try to track your collimation star if it's the brightest thing on screen.
Unfortunately there is no detailed documentation for these features yet, but you can find the downloads for the new beta version here
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3121
And documentation on the older version of feature tracking here
https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/3.2/#Feature%20Tracking
Hope this helps, Robin
the options that you see for the speeds at which the mount moves depend on the properties and functions that your mount claims that it supports. If you post a full log here (captured after you've attempted to use the mount movement functions) I can have a look to see if I can work out why you don't see any useful options in that drop-down.
There isn't a built-in function designed to keep the collimation star centred, but there is a feature guiding option which I have improved in SharpCap 3.3 (currently in beta). The new version in SharpCap 3.3 has two improvements that might be interesting for you. Firstly it can try to keep something centred in the view by moving the ROI area (providing you are running your camera in ROI mode) rather than by moving the mount. Secondly it now has a tracking mode where it tracks the centre of brightness of the image rather than trying to track image features – this might well work to try to track your collimation star if it's the brightest thing on screen.
Unfortunately there is no detailed documentation for these features yet, but you can find the downloads for the new beta version here
viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3121
And documentation on the older version of feature tracking here
https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/3.2/#Feature%20Tracking
Hope this helps, Robin