Beating seeing in Sharcap for an animation of the eclipse?

[abillionnewstars]

I have the eclipse coming up Monday. I am planning to get an image every 30 sec to make an animation of the partial phases in Ha. Since it will be later in the afternoon for my location, seeing will likely be iffy. Is there a way in SC to take a few images one after the other at each 30s time mark? Like a mini lucking imaging every 30s. That way I could pick the best image for each of those moments.

Thank you

[oopfan]

Your ability to "freeze" the atmosphere is a function of your exposure. The shorter the exposure the better. However, ultra-short exposures limit you to prominences and the chromosphere. You can employ stacking short bursts of frames every 30 seconds but this might be beyond SC's ability given the Sun is the target and not a star field. You might be better off setting up SC to simply capture a stream of short-exposure frames for the duration of totality, and then sorting it out by hand when you get home. At least then you have the raw data that you can try different strategies on.

EDIT: Sorry. I reread your question and see that you are only interested in the partial phases. It's only 3 days before the eclipse. You should have been experimenting with various strategies on the whole disk well before now.

Brian

[abillionnewstars]

EDIT: Sorry. I reread your question and see that you are only interested in the partial phases. It's only 3 days before the eclipse. You should have been experimenting with various strategies on the whole disk well before now.

Brian

Thank you for the life lessons but I am not asking how to image the sun.
I am asking a simple SC functionality question. I hope Robin can pitch in to let me know if what I was asking during the partial phase is possible or not.

[admin]

Hi,

There are a couple of things you can do...

1) Simple and likely to be robust

Set up a 'simple sequence' of captures using the 'Start Caputre' window. This can be configured to record a short video of maybe 50 or 100 frames every 30s. You can then process the videos later - PlanetarySystemStacker has a batch processing mode.

If you have an exposure of maybe 10ms (no idea if this will give the right brightness, just using as an example) and your camera can do 100fps, then setting a 100 frame capture every 30s would make each video be 1 seconds worth of images.

See https://docs.sharpcap.co.uk/4.1/#!2!Start%20Capture for more details on how to set this up using the 'Simple Sequence' section of the start capture window.

2) Riskier, but avoids post-processing

Use the 'Planetary/Solar/Lunar live stacking' tool in the latest versions of SharpCap (no documentation in the manual yet - see this thread : viewtopic.php?t=7189).

You can set this up to stack, sharpen and save a timelapse automatically.

I think you would very much need to practice this one first if you intend to use it on the eclipse and have never used it before. If you cannot get in a 'real life' practice session but have previously saved SER video files from solar imaging then you can load those into 'Test Camera 2 (High Speed)' for testing and learning how the new feature works.

cheers,

Robin

[abillionnewstars]

Thank you Robin! Exactly what I was looking for. I wasn't aware of those new features.

Cheers