Sharpcap with guiding..No guiding tab visible

[rjhamers]

I've used SharpCap Pro for several years to control my main camera (ASI1600mm Pro), but I"ve always used PHD2 separately (same computer, but just running completely independently of SharpCap). I want to enable dithering, and It's my understanding that I can do that using SharpCap via a software connection to PHD2. My challenge is I can't seem to ever get a "Guiding" tab to appear in SharpCap. I'm thinking maybe the problem is that I'm guiding using ST4 on the CGX mount rather than ASCOM connection through the handset. (No particular reason for this choice other than that I got ST4 working first and just stuck with it. Both SharpCap and PHD2 work great indepenently, but I can't seem to get them talking to one another.

Here are my settings:
Mount: Celestron CGX, guiding using a the ST4 connection
Main camera: ASI 1600mm Pro
Guide camera: ASI 1290mm Mini (with ST4 connection to mount)

In PHD2:
Camera: Zwo ASI Camera
Mount: On-camera (Note i"m using ST4)
Aux Mount: NONE
In "tools", "Enable server" is checked
in settings: Enable mount guide output is checked (although with ST4 I'm not sure this matters)

Any help would be appreciated !

[admin]

Hi,

in the current version of SharpCap, you can only use the guiding integration with SharpCap running in live stacking mode. If you turn on the live stacking then you should see the guiding tab amongst the other controls that let you adjust the stacking parameters. If you still don't see that there may be you need to check to see if you have an old version of SharpCap as that functionality was added (relatively) recently.

If you don't want to use the live stacking, the trick is to enable it anyway, turn on the option to save all frames before they are processed, turn off the option to align frames as they are stacked and change from viewing the stack to viewing the individual frames. If you do that you are basically using, but ignoring, the live stacking functionality and taking advantage of the fact that you can use guiding/dithering inside it.

Hope this helps, Robin

[rjhamers]

Thanks! This was very helpful and worked well once I finally got to try it--