New Feature : Easy Planet Tracking

#1

Well, this is hopefully an easy little feature to introduce...

Screenshot 2024-12-02 222606.jpg

Two simple new checkboxes in the ROI selection control which allow automatic tracking of planets using the camera ROI to be turned on easily.

* Center Planet will adjust the ROI to put the planet in the middle of the image being viewed - it judges the planet position from the center of brightness of the image, so if there isn't a planet in view it will tend to try to put the brightest part of the image into the middle

* Lock Planet is pretty much the same, but rather than aiming for the middle, it will try to keep the planet in its current position - handy if you want offset framing to get moons into view, etc.

Both of these will turn off automatically if you change the size of the ROI or alter camera settings like 'Colour Space' or 'Binning' that cause the camera to restart.

Adjustments are made no more often than once per second (some types of camera can create a glitched frame when the ROI is moved, so it's not helpful to move it too frequently). No adjustments will be made until the calculated position is at least twenty pixels away from the desired position, again to limit the frequency of adjustments.

Obviously, if the planet drifts steadily in one direction, eventually the ROI will reach the edge of the sensor and this feature will be unable to track any further - at that point SharpCap will show a warning notification at the top of the image to alert you that adjustments are needed.

Note that this is not quite the same as the more sophisticated 'Feature Tracking' tool you can access from the SharpCap tools menu. Feature tracking can achieve the same results (and do more like track using the mount), but is more complex to set up. This is intentionally simple to activate and use. I would not recommend trying to use this feature and 'Feature Tracking' at the same time - in fact I might disable that possibility in a future update!

This is available in SharpCap 4.1.12854, which can be found on the downloads page : https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/downloads

cheers,

Robin