SharpCap Forums

I am considering buying a ZWO 294 for EAA on nebulae. My laptop has a dual core Celeron 1.8GHz processor with 4G Ram and 64 bit. Will live stacking work if I use exposure times of 10 s and bin 2X2? My issue is that I don't want to spend the money on the camera, only to find that I need to spend a lot more on a new laptop. Thank you. John.

Hi,

best idea is to try to find some frames online of the same resolution and then use them in the SharpCap 'Test Camera 1 (Deep Sky)' and turn on live stacking - you can then see how long it takes to stack each frame and can play around with creating 'pretend' darks/flats to see how using those affects things. The only unknown then is the speed of transfer from the real camera to the computer.

cheers,

Robin

Many thanks. Will do.

Hi PoppyG

I've tried some very underpowered intel Atom based compute sticks to run SharpCap. The experience is less than ideal. You can get away with lower power equipment like your Celeron 1.8 GHz CPU for basic capturing frames from a camera and some other SC features like polar alignment. Your Celeron will even be able to run live stacking in SharpCap but the experience will be very laggy especially when your start to manipulate the live stack stretching, noise reduction etc. Also consider your laptop will also be running other applications along with SharpCap. The ASI294 is USB 3 but will run on USB 2. Not sure if your laptop has USB 3.

TLDR: It will work but you will not have a good experience.

GL, Chris