Automating the capture of planetary images?

[lukebl]

Hi all,

Just wondered if there was any capture software that allowed you to set it take a sequence of, say, 2000-frame avis every five minutes? i.e. a pre-determined pause before automatically capturing the next one.

The main application would be for animations of Jupiter where at the moment I have to stand over the laptop and click it every 5 minutes, but it would be nice to be able to do something else while it was busy! I can't see anything in Firecapture or any of my other capture programs.

[Steve Ward]

Sharpcap lets you set a capture plan to do this.

[lukebl]

Sharpcap lets you set a capture plan to do this.

Thanks, Steve. Unfortunately Sharpcap doesn't support my cam of choice (a QHY IMG132e).

Luke

[Bizibilder]

Firecapture does it. Set the length of the .avi and the length of the gap you require.

Go to settings - Autorun and enter the number of runs followed by the delay in seconds. If you want to run precisely timed events then set the .avi to run for say 60sec and a delay of 240sec. This gives you a run every 5 mins. If you set a number of frames you cannot guarantee the time they will take so precise intervals cannot be done this way (not saying how I found out ).

[lukebl]

Thanks Roger. I missed that Autorun feature.

I guess the way to guarantee the timing would be to record the avi by time, rather than the number of frames, although you would end up with avis with differing numbers of frames.

[Bizibilder]

Yes but the differences should only amount to a few frames per .avi - and the chances are you will dump quite a few of them anyway during the stacking process.