New Feature : Planetary Live Stacking

[lumenmikie]

Hi Robin,
While making multi-point alignment rotation-proof would be ideal, I can appreciate the complexities involved. From my recent experience, having the ability to reset the stack after N time-lapse frames would enable virtually automatic capture sequences. It's a less elegant solution than handling issues during the stacking, but if it's simple to do, I think it's a good option to have alongside your stacking improvements.
Many thanks for all of the work you're putting into this.
Regards
Mike

[admin]

Hi Mike,

yes, that is a nice simple, easy way to deal with it.

I will look at adding an option to reset every N saved timelapse frames - that way I can sync it so that the reset always happens just after saving a frame, so the timelapse will not capture a frame just after the reset. Depending on how long your timelapse interval is, you might set it as every 1 timelapse frame or every 2 or 3 or 5 or whatever.

cheers,

Robin

[AngeloM]

I'm brand spanking new to this hobby. I've been a photographer for 40 years but never used a telescope before 3 months ago. I've worked as a computer network engineer since 1989; now retired. I bought a C6" SCT and I've been playing with and trying to learn sharpcap 4.1 pro and have one burning question to ask. As fantastic as Sharpcap is, why are the images so small? 289X248 pixels 96 dpi Basically a postage stamp.

The images I see on my screen are very satisfying and saved images look just terrific; but they are very small; look great on a cellphone but they don't satisfy my desire to create photographic prints. I'm really hoping that I've completely missed something because I really got into this hobby to make quality 5X7" and even 13X19" prints of Jupiter, Saturn and whatever else I can't capture. I've tried enlarging images with Photoshop and an image Resizer I found but nothing really gives me anything close to the quality of the small images saved from sharpcap.
I'd upload one but can't seem to figure out how to do that. the link below will open the best image I've gotten so far (my third try)


Example https://1drv.ms/i/s!AiBp0L32JqxNl3BP8uT ... 4?e=hYc5NG
CameraSettings for this image: https://1drv.ms/t/s!AiBp0L32JqxNl3EDfA6 ... d?e=TOf2qG

I'd like to thank Mr. Robin Glover for providing such a wonderful software program to the world.

Michael Angelo

[admin]

Hi Micheal,

the size of the image (in pixels) that you get for Jupiter is determined by the combination of two things

1) The focal length of your telescope (longer focal lengths give bigger images)
2) The pixel size of your camera (smaller pixels give a bigger image on screen)

If you were to remove the camera and put a sheet of paper at the telescope focal plane, you would see a tiny image of Jupiter formed on the paper. The longer the focal length, the bigger that image is (and the more pixels it will cover on the camera sensor). If you use a camera with smaller pixels then the same size image will cover more pixels...

So, to take advantage of either of those points, you need to change your setup... You can increase the focal length of the telescope by using a Barlow lens or tele-extender. You could also try to find a camera with smaller pixels. The Barlow lens approach is usually the cheaper option and will give very similar results.

Note however that either approach makes the actual capturing of the image harder to set up... If you use a barlow lens then it will make a bigger image on our imaginary sheet of paper, but that means the same light is spread out over a larger area and is fainter - you will need a longer exposure set on the camera (or a higher gain) to compensate for the reduced light level. The same goes for using a camera with smaller pixels (less light falls on each pixel). In either case you will also find that getting the best focus is harder.

Hope this helps,

Robin

[admin]

Hi folks,

I have just uploaded a new update (SharpCap 4.1.11680) which has some more improvements to planetary/solar/lunar live stacking.

The first important thing to note is that the menu item has *MOVED* and is now higher up, directly under the deep sky live stack menu item. Apparently there have been people not spotting the planetary menu item near the bottom and getting stuck trying to use deep sky live stack for planetary. Having the two menu items next to each other should make it easier to spot the two and choose the right one.

Next, I have some bug fixes/improvements for multi-point stacking, including

* Fix for issue where areas with no align point nearby were becoming blurry
* Fix for issue where the stacking tiles were following the layout of the first frame added to the stack, not the average placement of each tile
* Fix for corrupted stack image when multi-point stacking enabled and the selected stacking area was small
* Fix for crash when no align points could be selected (and crashes in other odd situations)

Finally, I have added an option to reset the stack periodically during the capture of a timelapse (you can pick to reset after every frame, every 2 frames, etc). This should help with the alt-az rotation issues mentioned above (although some of the multi-point improvements may also help).

If you spot anything odd with this update, please let me know - I have been moving to a new development PC and this is the first version build on the new PC, not the old one. As far as I can tell it should be OK, but you never know...

cheers,

Robin

[admin]

Hi folks,

yet another weekly update with a collection of Solar System live stacking improvements - this week they include

* You can now enable 're-align colour channels' when using surface stacking mode (previously only in planet/full disc mode).
* Fine sharpening now only applied to luminance of colour images - reduces colour noise and improves performance (rate of display update)
* Fine sharpening can now be turned up to 3.0 - increased from previous limit of 1.0
* Increased range of choices for align point spacing in multi-point align mode, also a contrast threshold control to help control how far the align points go into the darker parts of the image
* Saved files (images and timelapses) from a single stack are now saved together in a folder rather than being scattered in various folders
* Improved auto colour balance gives more accurate and reliable results - an auto colour balance + saturation of about 20 gives a good 'mineral moon'

I am also trying to understand the causes of a crash that is affecting some people when using 'multi point align' mode - I have found and fixed one potential cause, but unsure that it is the only one. This new version has extra logging which should help me track down the issue if it happens again - please send any crash reports!

thanks,

Robin

[admin]

I thought it would be interesting to show the quality improvements that are now available by increasing the 'Fine' sharpening limit from 1 to 3...


An unsharpened image (2000 frames stacked, 2x saturation)

NoSharpening.png (190.15 KiB) Viewed 111211 times

The result of setting 'Fine' sharpening to the old limit of 1

Fine1.png (266.94 KiB) Viewed 111211 times

The improvement by taking 'Fine' sharpening all the way up to 3

Fine3.png (471.5 KiB) Viewed 111211 times

Finally, the result that can be achieved by adjusting the various wavelent levels for a minute or so (no fine sharpening).

Wavelets.png (463.26 KiB) Viewed 111211 times

(Thanks to Mike - @borodog - for providing the video capture I used to produce these samples).

I still prefer the wavelet sharpening - I think it gives a little more detail and it gives a 'lighter' feeling image with a little less contrast, but just using the 'Fine' sharpening is certainly easy!

cheers,

Robin

[PeterC65]

Hi Robin,

Just in case you're referring to the two crash reports that I sent on 18/1/24 during multi point planetary stacking, they both happened when I was trying to run two instances of SharpCap, both doing multi point stacking of the Moon. I didn't have any crashes when running just one instance.

Peter

[admin]

Hi Peter,

I think I have already fixed that particular issue - in those ones it looks like the image has drifted so that one or more of the stacking tiles are completely out of view. I hadn't considered that possibility in the first version, so the code didn't take well to it happening. I think there are other related issues based around the same cause...

In theory, having two running at once shouldn't be an issue - they will run independently, although I suppose you could end up running out of memory because two versions of SharpCap are trying to use it... I don't think that happened in this case.

cheers,

Robin

[surfwheel49]

I noticed tonight that my FPS is dropping way down (about 80+ FPS) when using the Live Stack. The last time I tried it there was no issue. Has anyone else noticed this? I tried two different cameras. Same result. 300FPS going down to 220FPS. When at 200 FPS it drops to about 130 FPS.
Thanks, Richard