Running Two Instances on the Same Laptop

[umasscrew39]

I believe this topic may have come up in the past but I would like to revisit it for my particular situation. I am planning on running two scopes simultaneously on the same mount but with two different model cameras controlled by a laptop. I want to do live viewing and save the data. Can this be done? If yes- please explain what I need to do to get it to work?

Thank you,
Bruce

[Jean-Francois]

Hello Bruce,

That is not a problem ... start SharpCap as much as you need.

I did in the past an occultation with 2 telescopes (Newton with QHY174GPS and RASA8 with QHY-268).
In addition with a third camera for the guiding.

So, I started SharpCap 3 times.

2 SharpCap were connected to the mount in addition with a planetarium software.

What you need is to tune a little the USB traffic of the camera.

Regards,
Jean-Francois

[admin]

Hi,

yes, you can run as many SharpCaps as you need, and connect multiple SharpCaps to the same ASCOM driver. Don't try to connect two to the same camera at once though - that often gives all sorts of weird errors.

Dithering is the problem when using this approach. SharpCap expects to be in charge of when dithering happens, so getting the two SharpCaps to co-operate over dithering may not be possible. It might just work if you set one SharpCap up to run the dithering and the other is set up to require guiding to capture/stack. Then, when SharpCap 1 dithers, the other will stop capturing/stacking until the dither is complete. For this to have a chance of working the dither interval would need to be considerably longer than the exposure (ie one dither every 10 frames, not 1 every frame).

cheers,

Robin

[umasscrew39]

Thanks so much for the helpful information, Jean-Francois and Robin. I greatly appreciate it. I have no need to dither in this case as I will be using the two scopes to do solar live viewing.

Thanks again to you both,
Bruce

[umasscrew39]

One more question: I display live viewing on a wall monitor. I assume I can only do that with one instance as the second instance would have to be minimized. Is that correct?

[admin]

Hi Bruce,

it all depends on how many monitors you have, and how you want to use them. The 'second screen' view in SharpCap always takes a whole monitor, but if you had 3 monitors available then you could have one SharpCap in 2 monitor view using monitors 1 and 2, and the other full screen on monitor 3. If you had 4 monitors then you could have both in 2 monitor view, using 1&2 and 3&4 respectively!

cheers,

Robin

[umasscrew39]

ahhhh.....great!

Thanks so much, Robin.

[NeilG]

Robin, On this subject, is there a way to tell Sharpcap which monito to use for the 2nd screen?. I have a laptop screen and 2 x 24" monitors and it would be nice to run both instances of SC on the laptop screen and have one use one of the 24" monitors and the other instance the other 24" monitor - any way to do this?.
Thanks in advance
Neil

[admin]

Hi Neil,

SharpCap will always try to put the second display on the 'next' screen in numerical order as far as Windows reports the list of screens (I hope that matches the '1', '2', '3' you see to identify screens when tweaking the display settings, but I don't know that for sure). If SharpCap is already on the last screen numerically then it will put the 2 monitor view on the first one.

That means that you can influence where the 2nd view shows up by choosing which monitor SharpCap is on before you go into 2 monitor view. You could then move the main SharpCap window to a different monitor once you have the 2nd view where you want it.

cheers,

Robin

[NeilG]

thanks Robin - I'll have a play with that

Neil