Feature Tracking Tool

[cairomike]

Hi Stephen

I've had great success using the 'Centre of Mass' mode for Sun stabilisation/drift compensation using the full disc of the Sun then doing ROI in post processing. I use the 'Use Mount' option not the 'Camera ROI'.

My equipment is a Coronado PST c/w AltairAstro 178M3 camera on a Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro mount.

I collect single fits images at 15s intervals for as long as conditions allow, and stitch them together into a video using PiPP.
Then in Virtual Dub I remove bad frames, adjust levels and crop to regions of interest saving each ROI in its own avi file.
Finally I load each ROI avi file back into PiPP and using its stabilisation methods create stabilised ROI time-lapse videos.

Regards
Mike

[cairomike]

Hi Robin.

SharpCap V4.0.9556.

I'm back Solar imaging again and using the Feature Tracking Tool in every session. Yesterday cloud was was coming and going most of the afternoon, it seemed to me that the Feature Tracking Tool wasn't recovering from lost/cloud obscured images as well as it did last year. Under clear skies tracking is perfect.

Something I should add is that in February I had a minor disaster with the data acquisition PC on the tripod and had to do a full reinstall of Windows 10 and all the astro software including SharpCap, so in terms of settings everything went back to defaults, but all seems to be back as it was before the crash.

So my question is; has anything changed recently in respect of the Feature Tracking Tool?

As an experiment I thought I could install an older version of SharpCap, can I install an old version alongside the latest?

Thanks, Mike

[admin]

Hi Mike,

I just checked and there haven't been many changes in SharpCap 4.0 feature tracking since October 2022 when we were last discussing it in this thread. No changes at all since mid-November. There have been a number of improvements to feature tracking in SharpCap 4.1 since then, so it may be worth trying 4.1 (and you can install that side-by-side with 4.0). Also, if you want to try two versions of 4.0 pretty much side-by-side, the trick is to install both the 32 and 64 bit versions - you can have the latest SharpCap 4.0 64 bit and an older 32 bit one for instance.

cheers,

Robin

[cairomike]

Hi Robin.

Thanks for your quick reply and the info. I guess my issue could be related to the Windows reinstallation, but I think I've set SharpCap up as it was before the crash. The annoying thing about the crash was that I had a Macrium Reflect image but when I came to use it it was corrupt!

Today I've had totally clear skies since early morning and feature tracking has kept the Sun centred perfectly since around 9am. I always seem to miss your beta releases, but I've just downloaded V4.1 and will give it a try tomorrow, although with the weather forecast being clear for several days it probably won't get a stress test for a while, not that I'm complaining

Regards
Mike

[cairomike]

Hi Robin

Just a quick update using V4.1.10700.

Yesterday cloud was coming and going all day but "Feature Tracking" kept the Sun centred perfectly, with out any manual intervention. I can't say how V4.0.9556 would have coped, but I'm very happy using this new version.

I think the addition of the "Move centre of mass to image centre" feature is a great improvement, it works really well, I no longer need to get the Sun centred before starting to guide, as long as the Sun is in frame I can click on Guide and wait for SharpCap to centre the image for me, before starting time-lapse imaging, wonderful!

Regards
Mike

[admin]

Hi Mike,

glad to hear it is working for you. I had made so many improvements (small and large) in 4.1 that I - finally - decided to remove the 'Experimental' tag from the feature name

cheers,

Robin

[wachtel100]

Dear Robin,

I am working with SharpCap to make video´s from the sun.

Equipment: refractor on old Superpolaris DX mount (no ASCOM, no ST-4 interface) and TIS camera (also no ST-4 interface)

Now I plan to use the feature tracking from sharpcap. Is it possible to get the correction pulses from sharpcap via usb to this interface:

http://www.store.shoestringastronomy.com/gpusb.htm

Best regards

Konrad

[admin]

Hi Konrad,

it might work, although I can't be sure. From the product page there is a user manual, and that links to an ASCOM driver download. If you install the ASCOM driver and set SharpCap up to use it as the telescope mount driver then you should be able to get into the feature tracking page and set up to use 'guiding rate' for movements. In theory that part should work, but I'm not sure how well things will go when you try to use it - the guiding rate is very slow movement, so the calibration will take a long time (if it works at all).

cheers,

Robin

[wachtel100]

Dear Robin,

the movement of the telescope is completly done from the Boxdörfer mount contolbox. I only need the correction pulses from sharpcap, to make sure, that the sun is not drifting too much during a long video sampling session.
Pls. find enclosed a schematics of my setup.

I assume that the correction pulses created from sharpcap can also be transfered via the ASCOM driver to the GPUSB Box from Shoestring Atronomy.

Therefore I will order such a box and give it a try.

The other possibility would be to buy a new camera, f.e. a QHY533 MM and use the ST-4 port from this camera, right?

cheers,

Konrad

[admin]

Hi Konrad,

before you order the box, have you considered that some cameras have a built in ST4 port that can be used?

Robin