New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

All the latest news about new features and improvements to SharpCap
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Borodog
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Joined: Fri Jan 01, 2021 7:25 pm

Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#61

Post by Borodog »

Planetary time lapse as written by SharpCap, with a wee bit of help in post from Wavesharp. I had to assemble the time lapse in Wavesharp to get the display stretch applied and I couldn't resist a little extra sharpening because that's what I do; I have ideas and I over-sharpen things.

https://www.cloudynights.com/uploads/ga ... 220863.png

I cannot wait to show this tool off at an outreach event.
Borodog
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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#62

Post by Borodog »

The new option to halve the wavelet scales is pretty great at critical sampling too:
Halve_wavelet_scales.png
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Altocumulus
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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#63

Post by Altocumulus »

Borodog wrote: Mon Nov 27, 2023 9:35 pm Planetary time lapse as written by SharpCap, with a wee bit of help in post from Wavesharp. I had to assemble the time lapse in Wavesharp to get the display stretch applied and I couldn't resist a little extra sharpening because that's what I do; I have ideas and I over-sharpen things.

https://www.cloudynights.com/uploads/ga ... 220863.png

I cannot wait to show this tool off at an outreach event.
Now that's a good advert for the routine! Congrats.

Sadly my new obsy is still in pieces and there's little sign the weather will relent enough for me to try any of these new tools.

One (perhaps silly) question @robin - could it live stack solar :D :mrgreen: :ugeek:
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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#64

Post by admin »

Hi,

great animation there from Mike - love it!

If you can get the whole solar (or lunar) disk into view then it should in theory be able to stack and sharpen the image. There are a few 'gotchas' though...

* Performance might be a problem if you are stacking/sharpening a high resolution camera at high frame rates
* Because you are capturing over a much wider area, seeing is more likely to significantly distort individual images, meaning that the simple 'one point' alignment won't necessarily do a good job in the stacking stage.

Somewhere down the line I will try adding offset detection from image features which would allow it to (try to) work on partial lunar/solar disks.

cheers,

Robin
DrBobAZ
Posts: 71
Joined: Thu Feb 25, 2021 11:41 pm

Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#65

Post by DrBobAZ »

Here is a link to a CN post featuring a time lapse of the Io transit last night. I could have captured the full transit, but I wanted it under 1 hr to meet CN EAA requirements.

Note that this is **without** any post processing. This was straight out of sharpcap live stack, essentially zero additional work.

Thanks again, Robin!

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/9004 ... p=13096571
Borodog
Posts: 366
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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#66

Post by Borodog »

Altocumulus wrote: Tue Nov 28, 2023 9:24 am
Borodog wrote: Mon Nov 27, 2023 9:35 pm Planetary time lapse as written by SharpCap, with a wee bit of help in post from Wavesharp. I had to assemble the time lapse in Wavesharp to get the display stretch applied and I couldn't resist a little extra sharpening because that's what I do; I have ideas and I over-sharpen things.

https://www.cloudynights.com/uploads/ga ... 220863.png

I cannot wait to show this tool off at an outreach event.
Now that's a good advert for the routine! Congrats.

Sadly my new obsy is still in pieces and there's little sign the weather will relent enough for me to try any of these new tools.

One (perhaps silly) question @robin - could it live stack solar :D :mrgreen: :ugeek:
Yes, as long as the full disk fits in the ROI and the background is dark enough to not screw up the COG calculation, it will absolutely do solar. I have already seen one full disk Hα solar example posted on Cloudy Nights.

It will also do the Moon, though there is little need, as well as double stars for splitting, or single stars for collimation. It's an amazing tool.
Borodog
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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#67

Post by Borodog »

admin wrote: Tue Nov 28, 2023 2:41 pm Hi,

great animation there from Mike - love it!
Thanks! It's probably too much but nobody ever accused me of making subtle, natural looking images . . .
Somewhere down the line I will try adding offset detection from image features which would allow it to (try to) work on partial lunar/solar disks.
I was going to give it a while before I suggested that. ;O)
WB91
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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#68

Post by WB91 »

Robin, great update!! Thanks!!!

I see you have the option to save as AVI but yet I cannot load an AVI into Sharpcap for this live stacking feature. Is this a bug?


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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#69

Post by admin »

Hi,

so far I haven't implemented loading AVI files (it's more complex to handle than loading SER, which is a nice simple format). The idea of saving to AVI is for cases where you just want a video to share. SER is the best choice if you want to reload/reprocess, etc.

cheers,

Robin
Borodog
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Re: New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

#70

Post by Borodog »

First time I've had a chance to use the latest version live instead of on a recorded SER.

1) It still has the strange second ROI box in the ROI. I just resized it to the full ROI (and SharpCap did not crash), but is that intentional? I don't see it in a recorded SER and it seems unnecessary, given that I am already using a reduced ROI. Maybe it's for people with tracking but no guiding who are using a larger ROI? Not sure.

2) The Halve Wavelet Scales setting did not appear to work at all live. There was no sharpening regardless of the position of the sliders.

Also, when the seeing is terrible the tool works great in IR. :O)
ir.png
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