Sharpcap live stack

[Jonathancilia]

Could be the colour adjustments i made gave the wrong colour, but its not a monochrome because i have other pictures with colour from this camera

[admin]

Hi,

given your camera and setup, the sort of exposure lengths you should be looking at

Bortle 5 skies : ~40s
Bortle 6 skies : ~20s
Bortle 7 skies : ~10s

The noise should go away as the total imaging time increases (so if you stack 4 frames it will have half the noise of 1 frame, stack 100 frames and the noise is 1/10th of 1 frame, etc). However, if you are using darks then make sure to take plenty of dark frames to make a master dark frame. If you have excessive noise in your master dark frame then it will *not* go away with more stacked light frames.

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

On the colour side - it's possible that somehow you turned off debayering in SharpCap, so you would not see colour, and you would also see the camera's colour grid as different pixel brightnesses - check that the 'Debayer Preview' setting is 'ON'. If you are stacking in another program like DSS, make sure that is set up to debayer the raw frames.

cheers,

Robin

[Jonathancilia]

m5.png (621.71 KiB) Viewed 1164 times

m13.png (815.64 KiB) Viewed 1164 times

Screenshot_20230225_094836_Lightroom.jpg (182.4 KiB) Viewed 1164 times

Screenshot_20230225_042248_Lightroom.jpg (246.96 KiB) Viewed 1164 times

IMG_20230224_111107_601.jpg (73.3 KiB) Viewed 1164 times

Some of the dso s come out fine though, bortle scale is about 6 or 7 here

[Jonathancilia]

Iirc debayer was turned on and i dont use dss, just sharpcap only. As for dark frames i put the cap on the camera before i start using the scope and take 20/30 frames with the gain and exposure i will be using for the night

[admin]

Hi,

some decent images there considering you are imaging with lots of light pollution using a camera that is really best for planetary imaging.

I'd suggest giving the stack a bit longer next time to see how the noise dies away. Also, set up live stacking to save the individual raw frames to disk - that allows you to repeat the stack later using the Folder Monitor Camera, trying different settings (darks, no darks, etc).

cheers,

Robin

[Jonathancilia]

Thank you i will take your advice

[Jonathancilia]

Is it bad to take many dark frames? Above 50 to average out more the noise? As i usually only take 20. And i save them as fits files this is good or should i change to other format?

[admin]

Hi

more dark frames will not do any harm (as long as you have the patience to let them be captured and the disk space to store them!). Maybe create two sets of darks (20 frames and 50 frames) and see if you can see any difference in the final image depending on which you use.

FITS is fine, and has the most compatibility with later processing with other Astro related software. PNG and TIFF will both work too (and store 16 bit data). PNG may save a bit of disk space since the files are compressed a bit.

cheers,

Robin

[Jonathancilia]

Thats exactly what i did i created files with crazy 100 dark files and others with 20. If tonight will be clear skies ill try them out