SharpCap Forums

I am relatively new to astrophotography and have been using your SharpCap Pro. My question involves when my program has finished taking the prescribed number of images and shuts down the session. When this happens I am unable to get the camera to come back on. This never happens when I manually discontinue. I want to start a new session and go to cameras and SharpCap will not find the Altair Camera or does not recognize the camera. Even if I press live view. I have tried everything.....shut down Sharp Cap....shut down camera. What am I missing. I know it is something simple but I have completely shut down sessions and stopped due to this issue. The next night everything is back to normal. Puzzled.

Hi Dale,

can I ask how you are getting SharpCap to capture the desired number of images? Are you just using the 'start capture' button or are you using something more complex like the Deep Sky Sequence Planner?

Ideally, it would be great if you could find the SharpCap log file from one of the sessions where the problem happened and post it here - it will quite likely contain helpful information.

cheers,

Robin

PS. I moved your post from the gallery forum to the Altair cameras forum

Robin,

I am simply using the start capture button and not going with the sequencing just yet. Learning my way with baby steps. Tonight the same thing happened. Under Start Capture, I simply put capture 1 hour of 20 second subs. Once finished it stopped the camera but then I cannot get the camera on again. It is like it is in standby mode and I cannot get it restarted.

Dale

Hi,

so to summarise, you capture 1 hour of 20s, you get the expected 180 images, but once finished the camera is unresponsive. Is this immediately after the 1 hour is complete or are you coming back some time after the capture is complete?

The things I can think of here include the following possibilities

1) the camera becomes unresponsive at random times - but then you would not get the 180 frames

2) perhaps the computer goes to sleep after the camera is complete, interrupting the camera communications.

cheers

Robin

Robin,
I’ve seen mention of this kind of issue with Altair cameras elsewhere, in the last few days - IIRC, it was in the AllSky source code…
The comment was that using the “close” method seemed to put the camera offline, and that it was not software reversible

Hi,

that's interesting... I will have a chat with Altair to see if they have heard of this.

cheers,

Robin

PS... you don't have a link to the other discussion by any chance?

Sorry, Robin, I didn’t keep it - it was one of many git update messages from the AllSky project: I can’t remember for sure if this was in the main sources, or, as I think more likely, was an attachment to a message sent by one of the guys doing a lot of work at the moment - sure his first name is Eric…
It was a “try this” type of thing, with his version of one of the program files, and this comment appeared near the bottom, in the cleanup functions; he clearly mentioned that this was Altair SDK specifically, and that the work around was simply not to call the close method…

Carl