Live Stack Failure all of a sudden

[SkyShed Admin]

Very cool Robin.

I'll try it out as soon as the Moon and weather allow and report back. Could be a week.

Thx & CS!
Wayne

[admin]

Hi Wayne,

just to let you know that I had an updated SDK from Altair this week - there are now *10* settings for the USB speed on the 26C.

Roughly speaking, the old values of 0,1 and 2 are now 3,6 and 9. There are new 'ultra low' values of 0,1 and 2 in the new scale that should be more reliable. Also there is a finer control between the old values too.

Maybe adjusting this will help deal with your lost frame problems without the need for SharpCap to do the reset magic.

This is in 4.1.10949.

cheers,

Robin

[SkyShed Admin]

Hi Robin,

I dl'd the Beta on Saturday night. Tried my usual 120 secs. No joy. No "count up" after sub duration, but no stacking. I noticed in the log at the time it said something like "Can only find 8 stars for alignment", yet there were 60000 stars (HT stretched in Live Stack) w/ many bright ones in the frame. And well focused.

Switched to 119 secs and got 55 subs on the Cocoon (see my FB post) before clouds set in. Weird that it's something about 120s it doesn't like?

I saved the log for you.

Thanks again for all your help!

CS!
Wayne

[admin]

Hi Wayne,

well, from the log there was much less in the way of dropped frames (only 3), and it looked as though 120s frames were coming through to the stacking even if they were not aligning.

Do you still have the raw 120s frames that were failing to align. I wonder if there is anything odd about them that might explain the align failure and perhaps point to what the true problem was?

cheers,

Robin

[SkyShed Admin]

Hi Robin,

Thanks again. I went looking for the sub folder with a couple 120's in it. But I guess because they "dropped", SC didn't create a folder? Botton line is that it's working at 119 secs. So I was able to capture.

Best!
Wayne

[admin]

Hi Wayne,

very weird... Does the 120s problem still happen if you connect the camera to a completely different PC? If we can work out the precise limits of when it happens then we have a much better chance of getting it to reproduce here in my testing and then getting it fixed...

cheers,

Robin

[SkyShed Admin]

Hi Robin,

Just FYI. Nothing changed with the PC before it started happening. Hardware-wise. I'd have to de-mount the camera from the Hyperstar, etc. to try it , and it's well tuned right now. I'd hate to lose that.

Best!
Wayne

[SkyShed Admin]

Hi Robin!

I've been busy and not out as much, but there is something keep meaning to mention.

I got everything working normally at 119 secs instead of 120. That's fine.

A couple for sessions ago. After the first frame "stacked", the second frame failed, then the third. Ah!!

Focus was fine. Tracking was great.

I checked the Log. "Could not find enough stars to stack" or such. WTF? There's 9300 stars in the frame, and lots of bright ones. Visible when H. stretched in real time.

Then I noticed that during dithering, sensitivity goes down to 75. (Partly) so they won't stack I assume. But the sensitivity stays there after the dither.

So now when I'm in the observatory, I set my timer to 4 minutes. Every time a dither is finished I reset the sensitivity to 85 or 90 and it stacks every time. Leave it at 75, the level it's at when it dithers, and frame may or may not stack, due to not seeing enough stars. Which I think I had set to 10. And I have high sensitivity turned on. Which was the first ting I tried, and left on since.

Is there a switch/setting I'm missing which will resume my chosen sensitivity once a dither is over? If so I haven't found it yet.

It's going down to 5 C on Friday night and clear here. I will be "chained" to my chair in the POD all night in order reset the setting every 4:30. I'm hoping there's a setting I'm missing somewhere?

Thanks so much as usual Robin. Can't wait to get back to 100% every night as it's been for years with SC!

CS!
Wayne

[admin]

Hi Wayne,

that's an odd one. What I'm thinking might be happening is that the sensitivity has some 'auto adjustment' capability - basically if too many stars are found then it drops and if too few are found it rises. 75 is the cut-off between the two behaviours.

So, if for some reason it is finding too many stars in the dither frames (maybe noise???) then it might drop the sensitivity during dithering. But surely it should be avoiding doing all of this during dithering - I will have to check that to see if it could be this.

One thing to try with the current version is to change the camera into still mode before starting live stacking. Live stacking works in still mode (it will fire requests for new frames to be captured automatically). However in still mode it will stop capturing entirely during dither, so if my theory is close to being correct, it may work around the issue.

cheers,

Robin

[SkyShed Admin]

Thanks Robin,

I wondered about still mode. I will do that tonight.

CS!
Wayne