Corona Boost

[Rocket_Guy]

Hello Robin,

Maybe I am going blind, but I cannot seem to find the corona boost function you mentioned in your most recent version of Sharpcap. Can you tell me how to find that option. Sorry to bother you on trivialities. Thanks.

Bill

[admin]

Hi Bill,

right now, it is linked in to the solar colorization and only available for monochrome cameras (or at the very least, a colour camera in mono mode). The theory behind that is that it's only going to work with a solar H-alpha filter (otherwise the brightness difference between the disc and corona is too great). I was assuming that if you are h-alpha solar imaging, you will be doing it with a mono camera.

So.... having said all that, were you using a colour camera?

cheers,

Robin

[Rocket_Guy]

Oh. I see. Makes sense. I was using a test camera just to try to locate the option. Thanks. Bill

[admin]

Hi,

ok, that makes sense. With the test camera, you can usually change the colour space option, so even with a colour image you can force the camera to turn it to mono, which would probably do the trick.

cheers,

Robin

[Tiago Ferreira]

Hi Robin. I do my live streams using color camera in rgb only and Ha. Is it possible to allow the corona boost to be available on RGB as well so i can keep the colors in the stacked display? Thanks

[admin]

Hi,

the problem with allowing that is that the current layout has no space for the corona boost adjustments when a colour camera is active, since the R/G/B/Saturation controls take up the same space. I don't really want to add a third column of adjustments, since that would probably be too wide if your monitor is not 'widescreen'. Hmmm...

If you are using an Ha filter then your camera will only pick up in the red channel (to a pretty good approximation) - can you switch the camera to 'MONO8' in SharpCap and work that way, or are you using RAW16 and have no MONO16 option?

cheers,

Robin

[Tiago Ferreira]

ok i'll try that tweak. Thanks for the info

[markj57]

I can get the corona boost to work, but am having difficulty getting a decently sharp image.

Does anyone have 'best practices' for settings for live stacking on the Sun? # frames to stack, denoise and level 1 sharpening, etc. I tried a lot of variations and see orange blurry proms and surface features.

Thanks

Mark

[admin]

Hi Mark,

the first thing is to make sure that your focus is as good as possible before you start the live stacking. It's always tricky with the sun as the seeing variations mean that the focus drifts in and out quite rapidly, but if you are watching the live video from the camera and can see odd moments where the image seems to come right into focus then you are pretty close.

Once you have good focus, enable the live stacking, make sure you have selected 'surface' and 'multi point' in the stabilization/alignment and set a target stack length of maybe 400 frames. Reset all the Sharpening/Adjustment settings then slowly increase 'Level 1' until you start to see improvements. Often you will end up going a bit too far when doing this and the image looks bad, so then you go back a bit. Repeat for level 2 and maybe 3. Hopefully you should start to see a sharper image at this point and can then fine tune. Exact values are hard to suggest as they will vary lots from one setup to another.

cheers,

Robin

[stbkaiser]

Hi Mark
Simon Tang , solar imaging expert , has a great youtube tutorial ( actually from a Skywatcher Webcast) for getting best focus settings.
And even better, He is using SHarpcap so you can follow along with your SC running.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yjiC5zt-Xg&t=3423s
The link starts towards end of webcast so rewind to start.
Take care
Steve