Planetary Live Stacking- Suggestions

[morayskies]

Hi Robin

Following your detailed instructions (thank you very much for these) for using the Live Planetary Stacking feature to produce animation, I decided to give it a go. Wow! What a fabulous feature - many thanks for developing this. A couple of suggestions which you may have already considered and dismissed, but, here goes.

1. Could a 'Contrast' adjustment be made available under the "Sharpening & Adjustments" tab?

2. Probably not 'doable' but could the date/time be incorporated as a label that displays with each stacked frame so that, when the animation is played, the date/time displayed changes with each frame?

I've only had one failure so far and, you'll be pleased to hear, was entirely due to my own fault. I was so engrossed watching the Frame Stacking Rate and Display Update Rate changing, I forgot to click 'Start Time Lapse'. Doh!

I must congratulate you on this feature which has removed so much pain from producing Jupiter animations and, in my case at least, the fear of running out of computer storage space during an imaging run.

Cheers

Richard

[Borodog]

The Display Histogram in the right hand panel essentially acts as a contrast control. Simply move the midpoint left or right to apply a nonlinear curve.

The timestamp in the time lapse might be pretty cool actually.

[admin]

Hi,

I did actually have a contrast control in at one point and experimented with it - it turned out that a traditional contrast control that boosts or reduces the range of brightnesses in the image was hard to adjust nicely alongside the existing brightness etc adjustments - it was too easy to end up in a mess and clipping all the bright stuff or pushing the dimmer parts down to near black. That's why I went for a gamma control instead which provides the same sort of adjustment over the effective contrast of the image, but avoids the sort of problems that the traditional contrast gave. Also, as Mike says, the display stretch can be used to boost the contrast by contracting the range between the black and white levels.

Adding a timestamp isn't a bad idea - should be fairly simple to do with just one more check box If you currently save your timelapse to SER then the SER file should have timestamps in it for each saved frame (you see those in SERPlayer for instance), but that's not quite the same.

cheers,

Robin

[morayskies]

Hi Robin

I take your point regarding a contrast control - more of a "would be nice to have" rather than be essential. I've subsequently realised, I can do a fair amount of processing within SER Player itself if I feel the need. The timestamp could be very useful bearing in mind the discovery of a new feature on Jupiter within the 24 hours preceeding the recent 4 hour video I recently posted. I looked back at my video and, based on other images I've seen of this "new feature" on Jupiter, I am fairly confident I captured it. I've now posted a link in the Gallery area of the forum to an enlarged and cropped version of this video indicating where the new feature is. The video quality is variable down to seeing conditions and misting optics - ho hum!

Hopefully, others in this group will be encouraged to image Jupiter more.

BTW I used to create MS Access databases when I worked in the NHS some time ago. How many times have I heard the phrase "Couldn't we just have a button to do...." or something similar, so I fully appreciate that it's not "Just another tickbox"

Keep up the good work work with SharpCap - still a 'goto' application for me

[admin]

Hi Richard,

I found space for another checkbox, so timestamps are coming in the next update (along with a few more goodies - more later). Like your video with the new spot, very cool

cheers,

Robin