SharpCap Forums

For some years I have been successfully using PHD2 with a Starlight Xpress Lodestar2 for autoguiding and taking images with a Canon 70D. I am now looking to switch over the Canon to a dedicated astrophotography camera, where I will use Sharpcap Pro as the imaging software. In preparation for this and to make sure that everything was going to work, I set up a Starlight Xpress Colour Superstar camera as the image taker on Sharpcap Pro - I declared in the Sharpcap Guiding menu that I was using PHD2 for autoguiding. I also clicked on ‘Enable Server’ in the PHD2 setup as per the Sharpcap manual. I then attempted to autoguide using the Lodestar and PHD2 and immediately got an Ascom error (see screen shot attached) which stated:-
"Exception thrown polling camera
(ASCOM SXCamera) Unable to complete get_ImageReady request due to previous error"
Sharpcap Pro also froze at this point such that I had to re-boot. Can anyone suggest what has gone wrong here? I subsequently ran Ascom Diagnostics and found no reported errors. I might add that although I normally run 64 bit apps, Sharpcap Pro is running at 32 bits to accommodate the Starlight Xpress cameras.
Sharpcap Pro v. 3.2.6219.0 32-bit
Starlight Xpress Colour Superstar camera for imaging
Starlight Xpress Lodestar 2 camera & PHD2 v.2.6.7 for autoguiding
Win 10 Pro v. 1909 OS build 18363.628
8GB RAM, i5 CPU

Hi,

An interesting problem – I only have one StarlightXpress camera here to test with, so there's no way that I can reproduce the problem. It sounds as though accessing the superstar camera in SharpCap has somehow locked out PHD2 from accessing the lodestar camera if I understand you correctly.

As an experiment, you could try using one of the 'test' cameras in SharpCap that are at the bottom of the camera list – these just show a fixed image on the screen and give you some controls to make adjustments with. I suspect that if you use one of these cameras then you will not see the problem in all PHD2 - if that's the case then it would confirm that it's the use of the superstar camera inside SharpCap that is causing the problem rather than anything else in SharpCap.

I wonder if anyone else here on the forums has used two or more StarlightXpress cameras successfully?

Cheers, Robin

I've seen this behavior before when using a ZWO camera for imaging and a ZWO camera for guiding. Sometimes PHD2 will select the imaging camera for guiding then you connect SharpCap or other imaging software and two applications are fighting for control of the same camera and the circus clowns are not happy. This may or may not be the case for Loadstar but have a look at the "connect equipment" dialog in PHD and click the double arrow button and make sure that PHD is using the correct camera for guiding. See image below.

PHD2 Camera Chooser by Black Wikkett, on Flickr

-Chris

I think BlackWikkett hit the nail on the head. I was unable to access the field highlighted since it was greyed out but I did substitute an old Altair GPCAM for the Lodestar 2 and did not encounter the earlier problem. PHD2 didn’t error at the point of initiating autoguiding calibration and Sharpcap did not freeze.
Thanks to admin and BlackWikkett for your help
Regards
Neil

I like to thank everyone on this thread. I just recently bought the ASI290mm mini and was running into the same issue with my 294mc pro stop working in Sharpcap went connected to PHD2. I didn’t realize PHD2 was selecting my 294 camera instead of my 290mini even though PHD2 was configured for the 290. Once I selected the correct camera everything worked perfectly. Both cameras and my Celestron Evo 8 hand controller connects to my mini hub I placed on my scope with the single cable back to my laptop.