How to do a Time Lapse using a ZWO Camera and Sharpcap

[localhost]

This is a 'copypasta' from my website: http://juststargazing.com/how-to-do-a-t ... d-sharpcap

Intro:
Time lapse tutorial put together by Matthew Knight using a ZWO Camera and Sharpcap.
I noticed that I wasn't able to find a guide on how to do a Time Lapse so I managed to figure out how to do it, wanted to share this guide with users who are new to SharpCap.

Video Tutorial:
Watch it on YouTube!

Requirements
ZWO Camera (Optional but recommended)
Having a ZWO Camera will be easy to use unless you're more advanced with a modded cam. Just make sure your ZWO camera has the ZWO 1/3″ 2.1mm 150 degree lens that ships with the camera.
Make sure you install the ZWO camera drivers or Drivers for your camera.

Laptop is needed to run Sharpcap make sure you have a lot of hard drive space... 500GB or more because you can go from 1 hour that will be 16 GB in file size for just 1 hour of recording...

You will need Sharpcap
You can get Sharpcap for free at: Sharpcap.co.uk

Start up Sharpcap I assume you have the camera connected to your Laptop by this time.

Once Sharpcap is loaded at the top left you should see a tab that says, ''Cameras'' click that tab look to see if your camera is listed, if you're not using a ZWO camera its possible your camera isn't supported by Sharpcap if your camera is a ZWO camera and not listed possible software issue or drivers not installed...

If your camera is listed pick it you should be able to see the sky if the fisheye lens is in focus you might need to play around with it till the sky comes into focus. If it's already dark out and you don't see the sky on Sharpcap you will need to adjust the Exposure and Gain and play around with the fisheye lens until you see the sky.

If you can see the sky and the stars are nicely focused you can begin recording your time-lapse.

Starting Time lapse:
Click the Start Capture tab at the top left of Sharpcap. (See Picture below)


On the Sharpcap - Configure Capture Window you should see: (Picture below)

(Pictures are low quality to help lower the load time. 'Mainly for my website')

1. Single Frame [x]

2. Unlimited [x]

3. Number of frames[x]

4. Time limit [✔]

We wanna go with #4 which is 'Time limit' You need to set the Hour, Minutes and Seconds for how long you would like to Capture.

Keep in mind the longer you record the more hard drive space you're gonna use up however a 10 minute capture for me was only a 15 second playback so the longer you record the longer the finished playback will be.

Under Capture Sequence of Captures:

Sequence Length; This is how many captures you wanna do say you wanna recored for 6 hours but you wanna Capture 1 hour parts 6 times then you'd set the Time limit to 1 hour and the Sequence Length to 6 Which will break 6 hours into 1 hour Captures or you can just set 6 hours for Time limit and have it be 1 big 6 hour capture.

Interval between Captures, If you're wanting to capture a Meteor shower I'd recommend setting it to 00:00:01 to capture every 1 second.

Note:
A 10 minute recording for me I only had 15 seconds of video.

[Sciversimon]

Hi, I was wondering what you use to join the avi files?

Cheers Simon

[remyastro]

Hi Robin,

I have a few questions about this explained way of making time lapse :

- when I follow the proposed way by configuring the Capture tab, the video isn't shortened, nor the number of downloaded frames. My understanding of the sequence option 'Interval between capture's is : 'interval between sequences', but not : 'interval between frames'. Am I right?
Shouldn't I also limit the frame rate at the same time, as you propose it in another post ?

- But what I want actually when shooting stars showers, is not to create a video, but on the contrary to create a single image composed of several sequences of shooting (i.e. 1s), each one separated by intervals of time (i.e. 10s without captures), so that to compose an unique image based of totally 10 mn camera run for exemple.
How can I do this using Sharpcap? It's maybe obvious, but I didn't find an automatic way sofar?

Thank you for your help.
Remy

[admin]

Hi Remy,

yes, the 'Interval between Captures' is the time that SharpCap will wait between stopping one capture and starting the next - it has nothing to do with the time between frames. You can use the frame rate limit to cut down the rate at which the frames are processed from the camera if you want, but I am not sure it is right for your situation.

I'm not sure what length exposure you are using, but if it is relatively long (about 1s or more), then why not set up to capture a single frame every 10s using the options : Single Frame, Perform a Sequence, Interval between captures = 10s

If you are using short exposures (like 1/20s), then you could use : Time limit (1s), Perform a sequence, Interval between captures = 10s

These will get you either a single image or a shot video captured every 10s. Obviously those would then need processing.

Another possibility - if you are trying to capture shooting star trails - is that SharpCap deep sky live stacking has a stacking mode called 'Max Value' - this uses the maximum observed pixel value at any position as the value for the composite image, so it should make any meteor trails in the individual frames persist in the stacked image.

cheers,

Robin

[remyastro]

Thanks for your clarification, Robin.

I'll try to use the 'Max Value' stacking mode as soon as we have a clear sky, because we will have the Lyrids meteor shower peak soon.

Cheers.
Remy

[admin]

Hi Remy,

might be worth testing first - that option doesn't get much use, so if there are bugs in it they are less likely to be spotted than elsewhere in SharpCap. You could try a 'star trail' image with a non-tracking mount perhaps as a test?

cheers,

Robin