SharpCap Forums

I recently tried, for the first time, to actually live stack a DSO with Sharpcap Pro, but unfortunately got absolutely nowhere. That is, as soon as I clicked on it, I got an error message stating "Warning: Last X frames have not been stacked, because: Could not align." I know I sound like a real beginner here (which I am), but I thought that all alignment issues were handled by the mount, not SharpCap. And I figure that I must have been aligned, as I was able to successfully slew to my target on the first try. Therefore, why would I get such a message, and how do I fix it? Thank you!

Hi,

This message usually means that SharpCap hasn't been able to spot enough stars in the image for it to calculate the alignment between each new image that arrives and the stack of images that is being built up. Have a look at the alignment tab in the live stacking area and see how many stars are being detected – for things to work relatively well you need at least 10 and ideally 20 or more stars being detected. You can try adjusting the settings on the alignment tab to make more stars get detected if you only have a small number (increasing the exposure length and/or the gain is another option to help detect more stars.)

Too many stars can be actually as bad as too few – if there are more than say 200 then it may be worth adjusting the settings on the alignment tab to try to reduce the number.

Hope this helps, Robin

Definitely helps, thank you. I guess I'll know for sure the next time I'm out (unfortunately it's gotten cold and windy here again). That's one tough thing about this hobby, I'm finding. It's kind of hard to practice some things indoors at home. You actually have to work on it it real-time! Thanks again.

I'd like to revive this thread, as it's something I'm still apparently struggling with. This time, I did go to the Alignment tab and tried to increase the number of stars used, but the highest it would let me go was 25. This time, I also noticed a message stating "frames not stacked because - Less than 3 stars found." So, the bottom line is that I'm still unable to actually do any live stacking! Any thoughts? Thanks.

Hi,

so the number of stars found is the critical thing here - if you are only detecting zero, 1 or 2 stars then asking SharpCap to use 25 does not help - there are not 25 stars to choose from as far as SharpCap is concerned!

Have a read through the guidance on using the settings in the alignment tab - https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.0/#Alignment%20Tab (note this docuemntation is for SC4.0, SC3.2 had some slightly different settings in that tab, see https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/3.2/#Alignment%20Tab).

You want to make some adjustments to try to increase the number of stars detected in both the stack and the frame - probably turning up the sensitivity in SC4.0 is a good start.

cheers,

Robin