SharpCap Forums

m13, Hercules Cluster acquired 12 July 2020 from Bortle 7 midwest US skies.
SharpCap Livestack
Gain=250
Exposure=600ms
Total exposure time=60 seconds
Unsharp Mask during live stack at 1.5
No noise reduction
Histogram on logarithmic scale and black level/mid point hugging main peak
Enhanced blue and red, reduced green
ZWO ASI294 MC-Pro
10.0 deg C set point (Ambient temperature=28 deg C)
4144 x 2116 full resolution
USB accelerate at 80
Dell 630D computer USB2 only
Max frame rate available with this laptop was about 2-3 frames/second
Telescope: Starmaster Hybrid Truss Dobsonian
14.5" Zambuto mirror
1582mm f.l.
about f4.3
Skycommander goto and tracking
Camera at prime focus but with type 2 coma corrector 55mm from sensor
Post-Processing in Digital Photo Professional to slightly balance color and curves
Total time to obtain the image was about 2 minutes at the scope after a half hour setup
plus about 10 minutes of DPP post processing time
Image condensed to smaller size for this posting, about 0.6 MB JPG (original TIFF = 21MB)
"Propeller" is visible as the less bright grouping of stars in a 3-blade asterism at lower left.
Very pleased with this combination of telescope with camera, and extremely pleased with SharpCap livestack and how well it works. Thank you Robin for authoring SharpCap.

That looks so great ! maybe I'll keep my Dobsonian after all

Nice one!
Had to look up though what you ment with propeller. Turns out I was taking it to literary, I was looking at the lower left of the image

Thanks. I had heard about this visual contrast feature but never seen it in any of my many images in the past, until this combination of scope, camera and software. I could see it on the laptop screen while SharpCap was livestacking, which was particularly exciting for me. If I’m not mistaken there are dust lanes throughout those regions that dim our view, creating the patterns. Cheers and clear skies. Ron.