live stacking ignoring frames also format problem

[jeruss]

Greetings, Was trying to image crescent nebula last night. When I tried to capture darks for calibration and selected png format sharpcap would change over to fits in the select window. Tried restarting it several times but it always did this however it was actually saving the files in png. I tried to go ahead with this but then just about every other frame would be ignored. Crescent is in mw so there must have been hundreds of stars to align on and in the fwhm tab the bars were well below the horizontal line but frames were being ignored anyway. Can there be too many stars for livestacking? Please, any ideas.

[admin]

Hi,

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the select window – do you mean when you were choosing which dark frame to use? If so that should list all the supported image file types as you can see below:

Capture.PNG (42.2 KiB) Viewed 1233 times

The live stacking system should tell you why it's excluding certain frames from the stack – this could be because of the difficulty in alignment, because you set up a filter for either the FWHM or the star brightness, or simply because the frames are arriving too fast for the stacking code to deal with.

The places you can look for this information indicated in the screenshot below – that is in the information box below the status, in the two filter tabs and in the log tab. In one of those places you should find the information that will let you know why some frames are not being used.

Capture2.PNG (31.02 KiB) Viewed 1233 times

Cheers, Robin

[jeruss]

thanks for the reply. What I meant is that on the right side where you select the frame format type such as png or fits or whatever I would select png but when I hit the start button to acquire the dark frames to calibrate the livestacking, the frame format would change to fits.

[admin]

Hi,

that's deliberate – the individual frames captured when you are making a dark frame (or a flat frame for that matter) are saved into fits format. The program should put the PNG format back after the flat frame has been created, and it should also save the final dark frame in PNG format – at least that's what it did when I just tested it

Cheers, Robin