Not enough stars with Altair Astro 294C

[Xio1996]

Hi Robin,

Thank you. I will give this a go as soon as the weather permits.

Many thanks for all your help.

Pete

[Xio1996]

Hi Robin,

This is most probably not what you wanted to read.

RC2 with the original 16th May Altaircam.dll worked.
RC2 with the RC3 23rd July Altaircam.dll worked.

RC3 with the original RC3 23rd July Altaircam.dll failed.
RC3 with the RC2 16th May Altaircam.dll failed.

The failure is SharpCap reporting not enough stars.

With RC3, pressing 'Clear' after the failure worked as in previous sessions. Each configuration was tried several times.

I hope this gives you more information. Please let me know if there is any way I can provide more information.

Many thanks for your help.

Pete

[admin]

Hi Pete,

well that at least rules out that theory...

At the moment I can't see another obvious cause in the changes between those two versions. I am going to think about it a bit more - it might be a timing change meaning that a small change somewhere else in the code either delays or speeds up something and changes the behaviour elsewhere.

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

Hi Pete,

ah, I think I may have it now...

You have a 'frame rate limit' set up in your settings.

In RC2 and previously, that worked by waiting for the next frame to arrive after the required delay had elapsed. However, that works badly when the limit is close the the exposure - you can just miss a frame of 50s waiting for the 1 per 60s limit delay and then the next frame doesn't arrive until 50s later.

In RC3 I've made it able to save the most recent frame from the camera and use it at the moment that the delay period finishes. That means that in some cases a frame that would have previously been skipped completely will now be delivered to live stacking.

Turning off the frame rate limit (set to maximum) in the profiles is the easiest option as that disables the behaviour entirely.

I will look at making the code I changed a bit more subtle to try to avoid the issue - to be honest it looks like there may be an issue with the last short frame captured being tagged with the longer (4s) exposure contributing to the problem.

cheers,

Robin

[Xio1996]

Hi Robin,

Thank you for spending so much time on this problem. I will set the the 'frame rate limit' to maximum and give it a go on the next session.

Thank you for developing such an amazing application and providing such quality support to its users.

Pete

[Xio1996]

Hi Robin,

Thank you for solving the problem. I installed RC4 and set the 'Frame Rate Limit' to maximum and it worked. RC4 performed in the same manner as RC2 and previous betas.

Many thanks for all your help with this problem.

Pete

[admin]

Hi Pete,

glad that sorted it - to be honest, I wasn't expecting the frame rate limit to get used in this sort of scenario, so I didn't consider the changes to that relevant. It was only when I re-watched your video and saw it set to something like 4fps that I realized.

The real goal for setting the rate limit is for things like timelapses or all-sky cameras where you don't want every single frame captured in the output video file.

cheers,

Robin