Issue with ZWO 294 in SharpCap

Discussion of using SharpCap for Deep Sky Imaging
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JLB-Darksky
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Joined: Fri Nov 13, 2020 4:16 pm

Issue with ZWO 294 in SharpCap

#1

Post by JLB-Darksky »

I really do not know where to start on which topic is specific to the issue I am having.
I have a ZWO ASI294MC Pro and it was auto stacking pictures good for a while the few times I have been able to use it. Pictures were okay but not great and I was not using darks. I am new to the ZWO camera but have done many astrophotography pictures with a Canon EOS 60Da and do know about using Darks, Bias and Flats. I have always stacked my pictures. However, I do have, for several years now, a ZWO ASI120MC-S, that I use for Planets and it does fine. I viewed many tutorials about using the ZWO 294 and similar ones. I decided to do the sensor analysis to find out what Unity Gain should be set to. I used my white sketch backlit tablet with several T-shirt layers to finally get the histogram to show something up on the graph. The sensor analysis developed the tabulated table and the setting from the table to equal 1-e/ADU should be a gain value of 119.
I am in a bad light pollution area (Bortle Scale #7). Then one night outside I tried the BRAIN and did not have any luck with getting any type of reading. I could not even get any Histogram peaks showing up on the graph nor any recommendations on the Sky Brightness.
Seems that the pictures using the Dark files, for the same exposure setting for Lights, are really dark. I have changed the Brightness scale, the exposure setting and the Gain scale and still cannot get very a good image. I am thinking that maybe I need to uninstall my SharpCap Pro and reinstall it. The ASI Studio and Nebulosity programs seems to be working fine with the ZWO 294 but I was liking SharpCap better. I have not tried DeepSkyStacker Live but I have used DeepSkyStacker for stacking.
Maybe I should give up on the Auto Stacking since a tutorial did mention that a plane or satellite trails will not be removed since the Auto Stacking does not do Kappa-Sigma clipping.
I will mention that the Affinity Photo software (a lot cheaper than Photoshop) does astrophotography stacking and processing, all in one software, very similar to the PhotoShop CS2 software I have. Except I never used PhotoShop to stack multi-pictures. I stacked with DeepSkyStacker or similar program and the processed in PhotoShop CS2. But now Affinity Photo is showing to be very good doing all.
Do you think uninstalling SharpCap Pro and reinstalling it will help? Or are there some settings for the ZWO 294 that I need to change?
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Re: Issue with ZWO 294 in SharpCap

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

uninstalling and reinstalling is unlikely to change anything. What might work better is to hold down the CTRL key while opening the camera - this stops SharpCap from restoring previously saved camera settings, so will put everything back to defaults for that camera. This can help get you out of a mess if you have adjusted pretty much all the controls while trying to solve the problem.

With the 294 camera, a good starting point might be 200 gain and 4s exposures - you should see some stars at that point and then you can make adjustments from there. Once you are happy you are getting a reasonable image and are seeing histogram peaks from the sky background, have another go witht he brain measurement. If that still doesn't work, please post a screenshot showing the outcome.

cheers,

Robin
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