SharpCap Forums

I set up my all-sky (fish eye) lens during the eclipse. I had it taking a fits file every second. There's plenty of room to do that since each fits file is only 1 MB. Taking a file every second makes it 3600 shots an hour. I was setting this up in a location a little bit away from where I was, and was setting it up for the day to capture the sky during the Totality. i had tested capturing leading up to it but didn't realize the limit until I was setting it up for the eclipse. I couldn't enter in a number larger than 10,000, so basically couldn't just let it run for the day. When I set it up, it was 11:00 am and the totality was a 2:30.. so you can see 10,000 isn't quite enough, and wouldn't be long enough for the whole eclipse. I was taking shots off of a dock in SC and it was dramatic in that the sun was going in and out of the clouds and about 2 minutes before the totality the sun suddenly freed itself from the clouds and was clear of clouds the rest of the eclipse. i ended up coming back to the lens a couple times, but messed up an hour before the eclipse and because of the 10,000 limit, it stopped capturing at 2:30... the totality was at 2:37.
I missed the main part.
I can understand a limit, but 10,000 is way too small to do time lapse. I didn't realize the limit until setting it up for the totality. Maybe allow 100,000 or something else that would allow a longer time lapse, if their file capturing type isn't going to create large files, or a warning of some sort.

Just a friendly suggestion,

Andrea

Hi Andrea,

I'm really sorry that this limitation in SharpCap messed up your eclipse imaging

I'd never imagined the sequence being that long - 10000 seemed to be a ridiculously big limit when I wrote that code.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know about the problem - I will increase the limit to 100000 and also increase the number of digits used in the file name to cope with this increase. I do hope that you at least enjoyed the visual views of the eclipse.

cheers,

Robin

No worries! I could see that 10,000 sounded like a lot. The Totality was still pretty awesome and like I said, it was partially my fault. I did go back to the camera about an hour before the Totality and looked at the # of frames left and thought it said 7,000 something left and thought I had a good two hours. It was running smoothly! Just wasn't 7000, it must've been 3,000 something left and stopped as it was programmed. I guess I'll try it again in 2024. My friends and I are already talking about the next eclipse in the U.S.

thanks,

Andrea