Is a racoon living in my telescope tube, or what?

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carlwagle
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Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2019 6:58 am

Is a racoon living in my telescope tube, or what?

#1

Post by carlwagle »

I'm having problems with many things that I was not having problems with in any part of the past.
Two things I will mention here that I hope you will agree makes in reasonable for me reboot (start afresh) my SharpCap driver.
1. about a week ago, when troubles began, I saw two symbols for SharpCap on my WINDOWS start up screen. There had been only one for about two weeks before the genesis of the second. I can right click on either one and do normally what is expected, for instance get here to the FORUMS or turn on my camera (ZWO ASI 178 MC) but I can't get a clear focus on anything now. It's like oil is on my mirror. I know it's not because the telescope works flawlessly by only visual use.

2. Gain use to be on a slider (like exposure) but now it is not. To the right of Gains on-off box for automatic operation is a box where I can type in a value where it is activated once I have moved the mouse over to an unused space and left clicked it once.

Could it be that I have unknowingly changed a default value while doing some LIVE STACKIN? It seems that most of my problems have increased and stayed with me since I started live tracking.

Another problem I have is focusing or even locating a bright star in the center of my SharpCap work station screen if the frames per second is say lower than 4 times a second. I don't seem able to get those kind of high frame rates any more at night. It seems that all I can use, no matter what I try is frame rates (rate of picture taking) well lower than 5 seconds per picture. It could be that this oily focus problems got to be fixed first before I can over come this latter problem. Frame rates seem peculiarly low now even in day time, like 3 frames per second,, observing the fire dept..

My son will be here about 4:PM EST tomorrow (Sat. Mar 30) and he will help me get what I need to open a FITS File. We plan for me to learn how to send you back a picture and that page that lists the camera settings. It's odd and unexpected but on each capture I get a third page that always asks the same question: Hello Carl, do you want to buy an Office Account?" Could this third page be causing any of my problems?

Thanks for any help you can give me. Carl Wagle
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admin
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Re: Is a racoon living in my telescope tube, or what?

#2

Post by admin »

Hi,

I'm a little bit confused as to what the problem might be here – it might be best if you could send some screenshots showing what is going on and pointing out what you think is incorrect.

Cheers, Robin
carlwagle
Posts: 73
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2019 6:58 am

Re: Is a racoon living in my telescope tube, or what?

#3

Post by carlwagle »

Thanks Robin for all the work and perfection you have put into Your SharpCap.

You think you are confused! Here is a copy of part of an Email I sent to Paul Patterson (fellow member of the Greensboro Astronomy Club) who is giving me some help and encouragement into an interest which is So New to me.

""
Date: Mar 31, 2019 1:51 AM
Paul, my son Sean really helped me overcome what I thought was going to be the last straw I could stand. Many little things were adding up in such a way I could not see through the fog because I did not know my Parka had slipped over my eyes! Just one I'll mention is: there is a zoom function that comes with SHARPCAP. Somehow,, I or a Racoon had slipped up behind me and turned it up to more than 300%. And it stayed on that way for the last 3 beautiful nights of viewing,, causing me to wonder what the hell is going on when ever focusing or trying to center an object in the work station screen at "shutter" speeds WELL slower than .2 fps.""

My son spotted the zoom problem right away. The missing gain slider bar came back after he removed from the Dell's (WIDOWS 10) start up screen one of the two SharpCap symbols. So mysterious problem is behind me. But have you got any idea how that Zoom got used without me knowing about it? The racoon had to know how to use the mouse!!

Before Sean left he tried to show me how to send you all some pictures and related camera usage history so I could do as you just asked. But he said that there was a low limit on how much Memory could be accepted by SharpCap. It seems a transfer has to be under 1MG. SharpCap promotes using Fits-Liberator which gives a tremendously large usage of memory. Could you elaborate on this? When I view the best pictures in the GALLERY it is hard for me to believe they use so little memory.

Thanks for you help, Carl
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Re: Is a racoon living in my telescope tube, or what?

#4

Post by admin »

Hi,

One of the ways of activating the zoom function is to use the mouse wheel while holding down the control key on your keyboard – I wonder if this was the way the zoom got activated without you noticing it. Anyway, glad to hear that you got that sorted now.

I think the size limit you are referring to is the size limit for image attachments here on the forums – that limit is in place to make sure that I don't end up having to backup too much information in the form of very high resolution images when I run backups of the forums. Usually you can make a screenshot small enough to upload by saving it in JPEG format from an image processing tool like Microsoft paint. Some people also upload images to a third-party site like dropbox or Google Drive and then share the link. It sounds like all of that is academic now since you are back in action.

Do keep an eye out for those raccoons though!

Cheers, Robin
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