A brief introduction to the SharpCap Sequencer

[admin]

Hi,

I looked into this a bit more and it looks like communicating with the MGEN device over USB is quite complicated, so it would be a significant amount of work to add it to SharpCap, which means that it's unlikely to happen in the near future.

If you're interested, you can see the documentation for the USB communication is available in a PDF file on this webpage : https://bitbucket.org/Isbeorn/nina/src/ ... NINA.MGEN/

Cheers, Robin

[danielrivet]

Started playing with the sequencer. It is already great. Are there any plans to allow plate solving in the sequencer. I don't see it useful for the actual planetary capture but I use it to align my mount prior to my capture sessions. I platesolve, sync, and repeat if I am not within 1 arcmin.
Thanks
Daniel

[admin]

Hi Daniel,

yes, that's already there in the latest versions – there is a step for this in the 'Mount' section.

Cheers, Robin

[DocHighCo]

Hello,

this is my first post in the SharpCap-Forums. I am using Sharpcap for some years now and it keeps getting better. Thanks for that.
As regards to the sequencer I would like to see livestacking included in the sequencer. I use livestacking with guiding and dithering to create substacks of short exposure frames and save them every few minutes. The resulting substacks I handle like long exposure frames for further post processing for deep images. This is not only for EAA-purposes. This way I get the advantages of short exposures over hours and hours without having to fill up my hard disk and I can reduce the post processing time.
Thus, including livestacking in the sequencer would be great.

Best Regards

Heiko

[admin]

Hi,

thanks for the feedback – can you give me a more detailed idea of what live stacking functionality you would want to be able to control from within the sequencer? Would start stacking/stop stacking/save/reset be sufficient? Or do you need more than that?

Thanks, Robin

[DocHighCo]

Dear Robin,

thanks for the very quick reply. What I imagine is to start a livestacking sequence (5-6 Minutes), save the substack, exit live stacking, platesolve and re-center the target, restart livestacking and repeat the loop in order to achieve long total exposures with substacks and stay on target. The frequent platesolving and re-centering could even replace guiding and dithering. Guiding is not really necessary for short exposures and the re-centering of the target is probably sufficiently unprecise to have a dithering effect. One could do even without a guide-camera and an expensive mount. This should even work with an Alt/Az-mount
Then of course it would be useful to be able to change target during the night and modify the camera settings etc.
As an example I took the Iris nebula with livestacking and sub-frames over 7.6 hours:

These are 2280 12-second-frames in 76 sub-stacks. It is much easier to postprocess 76 sub-stacks than 2280 single frames.
I hope it is not completely stupid what I suggest.

Best Regards

Heiko

[admin]

Hi,

thanks for confirming - that all sounds feasible.

Robin

[DocHighCo]

Thanks Robin,

one way or another I am looking foward to using the sequencer with Sharpcap 3.3.

Regards

Heiko

[DocHighCo]

Dear Robin,

Thanks also for integrating the livestacking features in the SC3.3 sequencer.
By the way, what do you think about implementing a dither-without-guiding feature (APT has something like this)?
In my example above platesolving and re-center can replace guiding for short exposures as long as there are enough stars to platesolve recognisable. The dithering is done by the imprecission of the recenter.
With a dither-without-guiding feature one would not have to rely on the imprecission of the re-center for dithering. I did this in a script with a call to the random.normalvariate method and randomly changing the RA and DEC position around the target position before the recenter.

Imagine: short exposure livestacks over hours with frequent re-centering to keep position and dithering to smooth out pixel errors- no guide scope, guide camera and guider software required, only the SC 3.3 sequencer.

Regards

Heiko

[admin]

Hi,

the idea of dithering without guiding isn't something that I have thought about really - it certainly seems like something ought possible. I will make a note of it has something to look into after I have all the current staff working nicely

Cheers, Robin