SharpCap Forums

Hello, last night I was using my ASI533-MC Pro.

I had the telescope with camera pointed straight up. Plenty of stars. The live view in sharpcap was completely black. Despite how I turned the focus knob on the telescope it remained black. I had sharpcaps exposure time set to 1 second and then less while trying to attain focus.

I eventually switched to NINA and took a 1 second exposure and adjusted my focus this way. With NINA set at 1 second and gain at 300 (mirroring sharpcaps) I was able to see stars and focus this way.

Is there some method to focus this way in sharpcap?

Possibly something I missed but I'm unsure why NINA 1 second exposure produced something that I could use to focus while in SharpCap it was just black

Hi,

possibly you have previously adjusted some other camera settings in SharpCap that are causing the issue - SharpCap will remember the camera settings from a previous session, which is usually helpful, but now and then causes issues by remembering unintentional changes.

If you hold the CTRL key down while opening the camera it will skip loading the saved settings, you can also turn off camera settings restore completely in File->Settings->General Settings (3rd checkbox down).

Another approach is to check that the gain was turned up in SharpCap to the same level as in Nina and to use SharpCap's display stretch functionality to brighten the display - https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.0/#!2!Min ... %20Stretch - possibly Nina does this automatically?

Finally, do make sure that the frame count is going up at the bottom left, indicating that SharpCap is getting frames from the camera.

cheers,

Robin