New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

[Ronin1956]

Robin
How do you add the new planetary feature to SharpCap Pro? I have checked for updates and SharpCap says it's updated. The tool menu shows no planetary feature.
Thanks
Paul

[admin]

Hi Paul,

the planetary feature is in the very latest versions available from our downloads page (https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/downloads) - the version available for auto update is usually older (by up to 6-8 weeks), so does not yet have that feature.

cheers,

Robin

[dasman]

I love the new feature!

Sorry for the novice question but I have never made a time lapse.

If you make a time lapse video, what is the playback rate (fps). In other words, If I want to make a time lapse that is 5 seconds long how many shots will I need? Is it 1 FPS which means I would need 5?

[admin]

Hi,

if you save to AVI (or WMV, I think) then the default playback rate is 30fps, so you would need 150 frames to make 5s of video. Saving the time laps to SER is a bit different, since SER files record the time of each frame, so by default an SER will play back in real time.

cheers,

Robin

[dasman]

Perfect. Thank you!

[Borodog]

Hello all. Although I fear it might be a tad late, or perhaps early, for those in other parts of the world, I will be going on The Astro Imaging Channel's Sunday night live stream tonight at 9:30 pm eastern US time to talk about planetary live stacking & enhancement in SharpCap. Here the link if you want to watch:

https://youtube.com/live/cni1cPYaYYk?feature=share

Thanks.

[admin]

Hi folks,

the new update (which Mike has now demo'd on the Astro Imaging Channel) is now available for download. The big change this week is enabling surface alignming and stacking for solar/lunar imaging when only part of the disc is visible in the frame. The things to note with this feature are

• Enable surface alignment in the Stabilization/Alignment tab of the Live Planetary stacking tool. Surface stabilization currently uses the center of the image as the stabilization measurement area, so make sure the target covers the center of the image. Changing stabilization mode will reset the stack
• Some features are unavailable in stabilization mode : Choosing to stabilize to center or not, tracking with selection area or ROI, re-align of colour channels
• Surface imaging is likely to use a much larger image size than planetary imaging (many megapixels rather than a few hundred thousand pixels), so stacking rates and display update rates will be lower, and you will need a fast PC for best results with large area cameras.
• The use of 'Halve wavelet scales' is not recommended with high resolution cameras - display updates will be very slow.
• To make it easy to judge changes to sharpening/colour/brightness when using high resolution cameras, when you start adjusting those controls the SharpCap will only update part of the image in view so that the image responds quickly to your changes. The fast update mode will continue for a second or two after you stop adjusting the controls. No frames will be saved to timelapse while in fast update mode

Other changes this week to the live planetary stacking include

• Improvements to both stacking and sharpening performance should lead to reduced CPU usage/higher stacking or update rates
• Improvements to auto colour balance to stop it from turning Saturn blue and to keep more red in mars images
• Increased range for saturation boost to allow 'Mineral Moon' images
• Brightness and colour adjustments now applied *before* sharpening, allowing a reduction of brightness to help if sharpening is causing some areas to become 100% brightness

Hopefully these new updates will make for a more exciting experience when solar or lunar imaging, particularly for sharing with friends or outreach events. I do have more improvements lined up over the next few weeks, so we're not done yet!

cheers,

Robin

A 'Mineral Moon' produced with live surface stacking of an old lunar video I had lying around

Capture_00001_WithDisplayStretch.jpg (930.41 KiB) Viewed 135082 times

[PeterC65]

I've just tried the brand new surface alignment feature on some old captures of partial Moon discs. Wow, I'm very impressed. You've really excelled yourself this time Robin.

[Borodog]

Another fantastic update. Thanks, Robin.

Your Moon is too green, though. ;O)

[seanjacksontc]

Many congratulations! It is kind of you to put in so much work for our benefit.