SharpCap Forums

If mother nature cooperates I am hoping to catch a series of images during the coming eclipse. Since we live in the path of totality I would like to capture a series of stills once every 60 seconds for 90 minutes with half before and half after totality. I know I will have to take off the solar filter during totality. Any advice on how to set that up in Sharpcap would be greatly appreciated. OR..... is there a better way to capture the eclipse??

Thanks
Wayne

Hi Wayne,

You list your location as "Bolton Laning" (sp?) Would that be the same as Bolton Landing? According to astrospheric.com you are just south of the path of totality. They say you will get 99.51% of the Sun obscured. What source are you using?

I'm driving from Peekskill (40mi north of NYC) to I-87 Exit 31 Elizabethtown/Westport. From there, astrospheric says I'll get 2 minutes 54 seconds of totality.

Brian

We will be going north a bit to Plattsburg at the old air base

Hi,

the simplest way to do this would be to use the 'Start Capture' button in SharpCap and then use the 'Simple Sequence' option at the bottom. Choose the following settings in the start capture window

* Single frame capture selected
* Perform a sequence of captures ticked
* Sequence length 90 - for 90 minutes
* Interval between captures 00:01:00 - one minute

SharpCap will then run the camera continuously but only save 1 frame per minute (don't forget to choose the right output format - probably PNG). You are free to tinker with the camera settings between captures to adjust exposure/gain/etc to keep the image nicely exposed.

Given that there are no second chances at the eclipse, I'd recommend a dry run test if you get a clear day before the eclipse (or even if you don't). There might be things that come up that are unexpected, such as an EQ mount having to perform a meridian flip to keep tracking at a bad moment during the eclipse.

Note that there are people working on much more complex automation of the eclipse imaging sequence using SharpCap - for instance see this thread : viewtopic.php?t=7451

cheers,

Robin

Hi,

I am right now testing the Time lapse capture feature of SharCap and found out that a time pause of 5 seconds is more likely ~6 seconds as the time starts to run again after downloading the image.

I am running parallel to a SharpCap session another session using the very old Lucam Recorder software and I see a discrepancy of images after 1h40m of about 200 images less in SharpCap then in Lucam recorder. Lucam Recorder does no take into account the download time of the image.

The camera running on SharpCap is a Saturn-M at 42.5fps.

I will need to calculate the exact discrepancy when I finish the test in 1h25m.

Lucam Recorder stopped development many many many years ago and only accepts Lumenera as well as The Imaging Source (DMK, DBK, etc.) cameras.

So I would advise to set it to 59 seconds when you want one minute intervals. A test is the best way to find it out.

Just my 2 cents to this.

Hi,

Adding to my message of yesterday I am running again a full time test, 2220 images for 3h5m and the discrepancy after 1h3m is 3 images which is acceptable.

I did set the interval to 4 seconds which means as I wrote yesterday a pause of 1+ms second for downloading and starting the counter again.

Problem Solved


Lucam left SharpCap right