New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

[PeterC65]

[quote=admin post_id=39594 time=1700692690 user_id=2]
I've also looked at Peter's error logs - the camera is disconnecting from USB repeatedly and then reconnecting again very soon after. SharpCap has code that will try to handle this sort of problem without interrupting your imaging, but in this case an error is occurring in the request for the sensor temperature at a time when it is disconnected.

I will try to fix that, but you still need to work out why the underlying problem of disconnect/reconnect is happening (the SharpCap reconnection support is designed around trying to deal with this problem happening rarely and to be able to recover most of the time - not to be a bombproof way to work with a camera that is misbehaving). Interestingly there is no change to the PlayerOne code between 11294 and 11351.
[/quote]

I've tested again with the Uranus-C camera and 11351 and it's working.

It seems that the USB hub on the mount only takes local power if it is applied before connecting the hub to the laptop. If the laptop connection is made first then the hub takes it power from the laptop, even if local power is subsequently applied. The hub is connected to the laptop by a 5m long cable and if it takes its power from the laptop then it isn't sufficiently stable to reliably power the camera, hence the intermittent USB connection. I only worked this out because I happened to be making power measurements of the equipment yesterday.

If I power up the USB hub before connecting it to the laptop then all is well, which has been my usual routine, but only by chance.

Peter

[admin]

Hi Peter,

good to know that there was some logic behind the disconnections, even if it was well hidden and took some detective skills to find it out. There has been a trend in the last year or two for cooled cameras with larger sensors to require 12V power even for use without cooling enabled - this came about because some of the larger sensor cameras were hitting the same sort of problem even with good USB connections, and manufacturers don't want that sort of thing as it generates support costs...

cheers,

Robin

[DiNakamoto]

Just tried planet live stacking last night.

Where do I see the completed live stack image? All I see is the live feed video.

Livestack seems to work just as good, or just as bad, as Autostakker.

--- Dave

[donboy]

Hi Robin,

Great new feature. Just tried it with Solar Ha live broadcasting on NSN just a few minutes ago. Worked great!.

Thanks for a new tool for imaging.

Here are before and after screen captures. These were taken a minutes ago using a Solar Ha setup of a full disc Sun using a mono camera using 16 frame setting. Larger number of frames resulted in sharper detail. I also ran it with disc stabilization for the longer frame stacking, but for 16 frames it was not needed.

Before:

Capture_00001__WithDisplayStretch.jpg (289.88 KiB) Viewed 389301 times

After:

Capture_00001wav__WithDisplayStretch.jpg (302.84 KiB) Viewed 389301 times

Don

[givoly]

Love the feature! Very well done and very performant on even a fairly slow computer! Captured and processed input of 320x240 at 200fps and displayed stack at 60fps - which is way more than required for the slow rate of change of the image.

Very important improvement is to allow saving timelapse at a different interval than one second, and perhaps not just SER output, so easier to post-process in other programs. Currently, to play it back, one needs to play back at 240fps or higher to be viewable...

ezgif.com-optimize.gif (968.28 KiB) Viewed 389277 times

(This animated GIF is actually played back at many multiples of real-time. I think it's 960fps effectively... Also, it is cropped/compressed to fit into the 1MB limitation of attachments...)

Also, can you implement drizzle? That would be awesome. Since now there's enough data to actually get much higher resolution than source image data. I typically drizzle 3x in AS3 - so that allows teasing out a lot of details.
Somehow, the wavelets don't give enough ability to process. I've attached above the result of last night's 5 minutes at 320x240 - played back at high rate to allow seeing it. It could be better post-processed..

Here's a link to a timelapse I created earlier this week the traditional way - capturing 15 seconds of every minute and creating one frame per minute for 125 minutes: SharpCap capture sequence -> AS3 -> AstroSurface (wavelets, sharpening, white balance, local contrast) -> PIPP for animation.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/ji1RnkBWp9Cdzzw19

This was done on the same setup - so same result could be possible, just much smoother, given an arbitrary frame rate, not just one frame/minute that I used. Also, the sliding window of the live stack would smooth out the flickering dramatically and make these sort of animations true poetry.

Oh -and one more thing - I was trying to capture Jupiter plus its moons, but the feature auto-centered on the planet, making the frame to capture the moons very challenging. It would be nice to be able to move the center of the planet to any point in the frame (pan/tilt?), so that the framing could be defined by the user - that way, I'd be able to capture moon rotation.

It would be awesome to see improvements in this amazing feature.

[flyingbarron]

Hi Robin,

Great new feature. Just tried it with Solar Ha live broadcasting on NSN just a few minutes ago. Worked great!.

Looks great - I'm definitely going to try it too

@Robin - As a purely cosmetic benefit, could we add false colour if it's a mono camera?

I love the greyscale Ha images, but I know that most people I might show this too would wonder why the Sun doesn't have a nice yellow-golden hue

-- Robert

[admin]

Hi folks,

thanks for the continued feedback - I am making notes on this and planning out what order to apply improvements to this feature (although the list a few posts up will keep me busy for a while already).

@donboy - nice to see it works for whole disk solar! In theory it ought to be possible to use image features to stabilize a lunar/solar image that isn't full screen (in the same way that feature tracking works), but that's a way off down the line yet. Unfortunately you can't currently select both the planetary stacking and the solar colorization at the same time - this is a limitation to how these things are implemented inside SharpCap - they both connect into the image processing flow in the same place, so it is one or the other.

@DiNakamoto - use the 'Save as PNG' button to save the current image as PNG at any point. There is no autosave as there is for deep sky live stacking, and I'm not sure if it would be a useful feature to add or not (In deep sky, the stack usually improves in quality as it runs, so auto saving the final image makes sense as it is probably the best. In planetary stacking, even with stacking, sharpening, etc, the best image can occur at any time due to seeing changes)

@givoly - stacking live rather than stacking a video after capture does place some limitations on how well the algorithm can perform, in particular, choosing the highest quality frames in an absolute way is impossible when stacking live. This means that you won't quite hit the quality that you can get in traditional stacking methods, but I will be looking at improving the results if I can. I have lots of directions to explore for this sort of improvement!

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

Hi folks,

I have produced an interim update with some refinements to planetary live stacking. I'm only going to post the download link here (and in a similar thread on Cloudy Nights) as there are no real changes to other parts of the application, so only of interest to those using this feature.

https://d.sharpcap.co.uk/download.html? ... 0&arch=x64

* Fix for no image update when stacking 16 bit data
* Fix for crash if ROI changed during time lapse
* Wavelet slider range extended and sliders changed to logarithmic scaling
* Add master on/off checkbox for wavelet sharpening
* Add options to save timelapse in SER/AVI/PNG and adjust interval
* Add flexibility in % of frames to stack when filtering
* Add readouts of Red & Blue channel centroid deviation from Green channel centroid (in filtering tab)

I have only created a 64-bit version of this update.

Clear skies!

Robin

[Tiago Ferreira]

_SC jupiter live stack 23_35_18_Capture_00001_WithDisplayStretch.jpg (5.66 KiB) Viewed 389114 times

My feedback testing on Jupiter: APPROVED!

Tested with moon: fail
Sun: failed

I may try with wider FOV to recheck

CONGRATS!

Can't wait to see SC doing similar things on DSO's...

[starLights]

Not sure if possible, but can something like this Planetary Live Stacking feature be achieved using a smartphone?

I would love to be able to attach my iPhone to the telescope eyepiece for live viewing, and then have the live view enhanced by doing something like live stacking.