SharpCap Forums

Repeated this today - 2 questions below
QHY 168C
SharpCap 3.1
Dell Inspiron 5720 8Gb RAM, 2.5 GHz, 16-bit OS
Win 7

1. Capture window doesn't close after taking flats - repeated 4 times
Capturing Flats
Select Capture/Capture Flat- set 9 images to be averaged and saved
Once capture has finished and final image is confirmed as saved, the Capture window remains greyed out and won't close
I waited about 5 minutes after Flat has saved to disk, and still doesn't close
Only way to close is to shutdown SharpCap - restart camera, restart temp control etc.

2. While setting for Capture for Flat, the Capture window reports "Too many pixels below 10%"
On viewing Histogram, the main RGB levels are at 60-70%, with a small number of pixels near 10%
Increasing exposure so the 10% alert goes away immediately brings up the saturated pixel alert

Attached is the logfile
Thanks!

Martin Ratcliffe

On the image brightness, it's a matter of finding a balance - sometimes you will not find a point where all the warnings go away, so just do the best you can.

On the freeze it looks like you were capturing frames from 14:12:26 to 14:13:44, but they didn't finish writing those frames to disk until 14:15:27 - that's a surprisingly long time to write 10 frames or so.

Following on from that in the log you tried to close the application at 14:19:35 and then finally (at 14:27:10) there is a line that looks like it is coming from the code that is trying to save the final master flat file.

So, the question is - why does it take so long to average the 10 captured individual flat frames into the master flat and why is it taking so long to save the individual flat frames. You have plenty of memory and a core i5 processor which isn't the fastest in the world, but it's not slow by any means.

The fact that it took nearly 2 minutes to write the 10 captured flat frames makes me wonder if your hard disk was slow (or busy doing something else like updates at the same time).

I'd suggest trying again with a lower number of frames to begin with and watching the notifications that appear in the green bar at the top - you should see notifications about writing frames, then averaging frames, then finally one about 'file saved to ...'. For me with the Altair 183C (similar resolution) it takes about 10 seconds to write the captured frames and 15-20 to average them. If you can get things to work with 2 or 3 frames, gradually try bigger numbers to see if it is just generally taking longer to finish or if it suddenly breaks at some particular number of frames.

cheers,

Robin