SharpCap Forums

Hi! Long time user, first time poster here

Planet/Disk Stabilization is great, but I have one problem with that feature, and it's the colour of areas outside of recording area. It's grey obviously, and that can make it problematic eg. for Autostakkert to properely align frames in planetary (COG) mode, because those grey bands are much brighter than background.
Would it be possible to add an option to change the colour of those "out of bounds" areas to somehow match background sky colour?

Hi

As far as I know that's just a onscreen indication color, it's not captured.

Menno

No, unfortunately it is captured; it's even mentioned in manual:
"Stabilizing the planet/disk to the centre of each frame affects both the image as shown on screen and the image data saved to any image or video files." So, basically, what you see is what you get.

Ah okay, didn't know that. Haven't used the feature myself yet.

Menno

Hi,

thanks for the suggestion- one of the reasons for the grey rather than black is to make it fairly clear to the user that this is not 'magic' keeping your target in the center that will keep working forever - if the target meets the gray area then you will start to lose the target image.

However, I can see that problems might occur with alignment applications seeing the grey as part of the 'keep' bit of the image. I wonder what a good compromise answer is - I fear that if I go too much darker then the advantage of the grey that I outlined above will be lost

cheers,

Robin

Yeah, I understand that's important information. One way to do it would be only displaying those bands in grey, but recording them in black or better yet - background color (something like stretch last column/row of pixels?), but I don't know it's possible.
Alternatively, instead of those bands you could add an outline, outside of recording area (that wouldn't be actually captured) that would eg. get more and more red as your image moves farther off center, so solid red would mean you're about to lose target. Or maybe it could start to blink red, first slowly when you're only a litte off, then fast when you go farther, and turn solid red when you're almost out. Something like that:

Hmmm,

I wonder how a single band of red pixels around the boundary area would work out? It should be visible to the end user and maybe it will be something that will not upset the stacking programs.

I will try some alternatives and see how AS!2/AS!3 copes

cheers,

Robin

A line one pixel wide would probably get rejected by sigma clipping or similar algorithm (there is some form of outlier rejection in AS!3, right?), since it would be all over the place relative to planet disk.
And even if not, if it was always at the edge of the frame, it would be trivial to get rid of it by simply cropping the recording slightly.

For stacking SER files you could also try PlanetarySystemStacker. Maybe it can work better with this?
Info and download on https://github.com/Rolf-Hempel/Planetar ... r/releases
For SER stacking it's my preferred stacker: the result is just that bit better/sharper than AS!3.

Menno

I don't know why I didn't mention it earlier, but:
those gray bars seem to actually show up immediately, when planet moves just a little. I think it would be better to show them only when ROI has to move out of sensor area to keep planet centered.