Cancelled plate solve changes camera settings?

[lowenthalm]

I had a case last night where I was using the recentering feature in live stack and plate solves started failing, so I cancelled the plate solve in progress and unchecked the the recentering option for the rest of the live stack run. I noticed something looked a little off a short time later as the accumulated live-stacked image started changing color and found that the gain had been lowered from 320 to 310 and the camera brightness was lowered from 8 to 6. Does plate solve mess with these settings? I am pretty sure I had the gain correctly set at 320 and very sure I didn't change the brightness to 6. This all happened during a sequence for live stacking a sequence of images, with controls unlocked so I could adjust FWHM, and other settings during live-stack. The tabs for both of theses settings were closed, so it should not have been possible for them to get keyboard focus or receive random mouse clicks.

This was with the previous version 4.1.10478.0. I installed the latest 4.1 version and will try again tonight to see if I can reproduce the problem by cancelling plate solve during recenter.

I have previously noticed gain and/or exposure time (for example, 6.0 seconds changing to 5.8 seconds) occasionally magically change on their own in version 4.0, although I have not seen this happen with any of the releases this year, at least so far. It is fairly rare, maybe one in 10 nights of operation, so I might not have been unlucky yet. I also now tend to close the tabs with these controls to prevent them from getting keyboard focus and errant mouse clicks, so maybe this change in my behavior has prevented whatever is going on here from happening as much as it once did. I never noticed that this behavior in 4.0 had any association with plate solving - it just seemed to be a random occurrence.

[admin]

Hi,

SharpCap will lower the exposure time to 2s during recenter and dither operations while live stacking, but it *should* put it back again at the end of the operation. I must admit that it's possible that a cancellation during the plate solve may bypass putting the value back - I will check. I can't see how that would affect the gain value though - there is no code there to change the gain.

On a similar note, there is code to change gain and exposure during the GOTO Target tool, but again it should put things back, and anyway, sounds like you were not using that tool at the time.

If you happen to catch it happening again and have a rough idea of when the change happened, please share a log of that session and I will have a look to see if there is anything at that time that might explain it. In theory you could turn on the additional logging of 'Camera Hardware Communication', but that tends to produce a *vast* amount of info in the log, so is only really useful if you can catch something happening in a short test. For longer sessions there tends to be so much info that it is hard to find anything...

cheers,

Robin

[lowenthalm]

There is a small possibility that the I put in a gain of 310 instead of 320 after taking some flats prior to the observing session. It's unlikely though.

I am really concerned how on earth the camera brightness setting changed to 6. Exposures were set to 6.0 seconds and if I recall correctly, the exposure was properly restored after cancelling the plate solve, while the gain and the camera brightness were now wrong. (I am using a ZWO ASI 294 Pro Cooled camera). It's an interesting coincidence that the brightness was changed to 6, the same as the original exposure setting. If somehow the controls references got crossed up when I cancelled and closed the failing plate solve maybe the wrong control got hit with the new value. I was running in a sequence here, so I can imagine there are a few layers of state saving involved here!

[admin]

Hi,

I did check through the code yesterday and as far as I can see the plate solving should put the exposure back if it is cancelled, and there is no code there to adjust gain or brightness, so definitely odd.

Thinking about it some more, you could try turning on the extra logging for 'Camera Control values and Capture Profiles' - that should record all the camera control changes into the log, which could be used to track down where any spurious changes are coming from if they happen again. It also shouldn't produce quite as much of a flood of information as the 'Camera Hardware Communications' option.

cheers,

Robin

[lowenthalm]

I had the exposure change to a strange value again tonight. Here is the section of the log where it changed from 6.0 seconds to 7.135 seconds. I turned on the control logging, so hopefully that helps. Let me know if you would like the entire log. I ran a live stack in a sequence, then cancelled the sequence and focused with my Bahtinov mask and then started stacking a new target and cancelled it because I wanted to stack using 5.0 second exposures at which point I discovered that the exposure had change values without me touching the exposure.


bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.StartExposure()
Debug 01:58:49.641374 #4 Finished ZWO Exposure of 6000ms, gotFrame = True in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.GetFrameData(int timeout, BufferFrame frame, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
Debug 01:58:49.643571 #4 Starting ZWO Exposure of 6000ms in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.StartExposure()
Debug 01:58:55.982207 #4 Finished ZWO Exposure of 6000ms, gotFrame = True in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.GetFrameData(int timeout, BufferFrame frame, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
Debug 01:58:55.986361 #4 Starting ZWO Exposure of 6000ms in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.StartExposure()
Info 01:58:57.392619 #1 Toolbar/Menu input : SharpCap.ViewModels.Actions.TransformAction Bahtinov Mask executing in async Task SharpCap.ViewModels.UIAction.ExecuteAsync()
Info 01:58:57.392870 #1 Changing transform from None to Bahtinov Mask due to button click on Bahtinov Mask in void SharpCap.ViewModels.Actions.TransformAction.ExecuteSync()
Info 01:58:57.393094 #1 Selecting transform Bahtinov Mask in void SharpCap.Models.Transforms.set_SelectedTransform(ITransform value)
Info 01:58:57.400109 #1 Loading SharpCap.FrameTransforms.Focus.WPFFocusScoreControl, MinHeight is 220, ActualHeight is 355.54979614257815 in void SharpCap.New.DockingArea.SetToolContent(Control value)
Info 01:58:57.408025 #1 Toolbar/Menu input : SharpCap.ViewModels.Actions.TransformAction Bahtinov Mask complete in async Task SharpCap.ViewModels.UIAction.ExecuteAsync()
Info 01:58:59.815892 #1 Dropped frames : 2 of type DroppedBeforeTransform in void SharpCap.Base.DroppedFrameLogger.Count(DroppedFrameType type, int count)
Info 01:59:01.443205 #1 Dropped frames : 4 of type DroppedBeforeTransform in void SharpCap.Base.DroppedFrameLogger.Count(DroppedFrameType type, int count)
Debug 01:59:02.351921 #4 Finished ZWO Exposure of 6000ms, gotFrame = True in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.GetFrameData(int timeout, BufferFrame frame, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
Debug 01:59:02.358620 #4 Starting ZWO Exposure of 6000ms in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.StartExposure()
Info 01:59:02.632024 #1 Dropped frames : 8 of type DroppedBeforeTransform in void SharpCap.Base.DroppedFrameLogger.Count(DroppedFrameType type, int count)
Debug 01:59:07.739939 #4 Finished ZWO Exposure of 6000ms, gotFrame = True in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.GetFrameData(int timeout, BufferFrame frame, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
Debug 01:59:07.746603 #4 Starting ZWO Exposure of 7135.243ms in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.StartExposure()
Debug 01:59:15.221872 #4 Finished ZWO Exposure of 7135.243ms, gotFrame = True in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.GetFrameData(int timeout, BufferFrame frame, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
Debug 01:59:15.225197 #4 Starting ZWO Exposure of 7135.243ms in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.StartExposure()
Debug 01:59:22.701700 #4 Finished ZWO Exposure of 7135.243ms, gotFrame = True in bool SharpCap.Cameras.ASI.ASICameraProxy.GetFrameData(int timeout, BufferFrame frame, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
Debug 01:59:22.704956 #4 Starting ZWO Exposure of 7135.243ms in

[admin]

Hi,

brilliant, just seeing the exact values lets me work out what is going on...

You hit the F2 key on the keyboard (probably accidentally).

The F2 key is the shortcut for increase exposure, and it increases the exposure by 18.9% every time it is pressed (four presses double the exposure). 18.9% added to 6s is 7.135s.

F1 and F2 decrease and increase exposure
F3 and F4 are gain
F5 and F6 are offset/black level/brightness

I think the mystery is solved

cheers,

Robin

[lowenthalm]

Oh jeez. I have dynamic touch sensitive keys at the top of my keyboard. I might have brushed them somehow. I had no idea.

Why would these need short cuts? Doesn’t seem like something you need a hot keys for. Can I disable this in sharpcap somehow? Just seems to invite trouble rather than solve a problem.

[admin]

Hi,

lots of people like to work using the keyboard as much as possible - it certainly makes things easier in certain situations.

The full list of keyboard shortcuts (as of 4.0 - there are more now) is here : https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.0/#Keyboard%20Shortcuts

I'm afraid there is no way to turn them off.

cheers,

Robin