Saturn March 22nd sharpcap (avg seeing).

[Space Cowboy]

Not a great night, seeing was not great and still having big tracking problems. Decided to try Sharpcap instead of Craterlet to avoid the yellow fever problem but Sharpcap crashed on first capture so used vxastrocapture instead which produced disappointing results (very noisy when gain is high).

Ended up trying sharpcap again before packing up and got a 1000 frame capture before saturn went awol along with my patience.

2 images from the sharpcap capture..considering the shortness of the avi it certainly beats the pants off astrocapture........sadly the dreaded yellow returned (astrocapture does not produce yellow).

Will try firecapture next time. Sharpcap looks great but crashing really worries me.

[Spikey]

These are good images Stuart, did you use your Dob to capture?

What operating system are you running with Sharpcap and which version of Sharpcap have you got?

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks Simon, yes these are taken with the auto Dob.

I'm using windows xp and sharpcap v 1.3.117.0.

[neil phillips]

Hi Stuart to avoid these colour problems set HUE to default, and keep tweaking the red and blue sliders untill the rings look whiter. This is either a hue problem, or gross red and blue slider colour inbalance

[rwg]

Hi Stuart,

if SharpCap crashed on you it probably either showed a dialog with lots of text in which would tell me what caused it to crash _or_ left a file called SharpCap.dmp (which is a crash dump log) on your desktop.

If you have either of these, send them to me and I will try to work out what went wrong.

cheers,

Robin

[AztecastroMcJ]

Good effort Stuart, still good detail

i agree that astrocapture shows bit more gain/noise than craterlet

still not tryd sharpcap, but K3CCD is excellent with windows xp

less noise than both of above, trouble i have is laptop is vista while my pc is xp,

hence why i use craterlet at min.

[Space Cowboy]

Hi Stuart to avoid these colour problems set HUE to default, and keep tweaking the red and blue sliders untill the rings look whiter. This is either a hue problem, or gross red and blue slider colour inbalance

Thanks Neil I assume you mean camera settings?

[Space Cowboy]

Hi Stuart,

if SharpCap crashed on you it probably either showed a dialog with lots of text in which would tell me what caused it to crash _or_ left a file called SharpCap.dmp (which is a crash dump log) on your desktop.

If you have either of these, send them to me and I will try to work out what went wrong.

cheers,

Robin

Robin it was just a short error message but there is no sign of a dump log file. I tried again last night, did one 6 min capture then selected the drop down menu containing focus, histogram ect and suddenly got the dreaded blue screen crash

[Space Cowboy]

Good effort Stuart, still good detail

i agree that astrocapture shows bit more gain/noise than craterlet

still not tryd sharpcap, but K3CCD is excellent with windows xp

less noise than both of above, trouble i have is laptop is vista while my pc is xp,

hence why i use craterlet at min.

Cheers James, yep might try k3ccd again.

[cgarry]

Hi Stuart,

What type of barlow are you using to capture your Saturn images? I wonder if you have used so much magnification that the surface brightness of Saturn is too low for the cam to do its auto whitebalance correctly.

I say this because I noticed that your images seem to be much larger than the ones I produce yet your aperture in not that much bigger (235mm vs 250mm). Unless of course you are enlarging the images later in processing! I am working at F/25 when I capture Saturn.

Cheers,

Chris

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks Chris, I'm using 5.5x giving f27. The same problem occurred at f15..sometimes the image is not yellow but brightness does not seem to make any difference. My best image taken at f27 with a natural colour was straight after a yellow image with exactly the same camera settings and capture software.

[neil phillips]

Thanks Chris, I'm using 5.5x giving f27. The same problem occurred at f15..sometimes the image is not yellow but brightness does not seem to make any difference. My best image taken at f27 with a natural colour was straight after a yellow image with exactly the same camera settings and capture software.

well that really doesnt make any sense unless you have a auto white balance. Or colour. other than that. your camera shouldnt be changing its colour mind ???? under exposure can alter colour balance somewhat. but thats not what your saying. Hue should be set to default, red and green sliders set so the colour balance looks as close to Johns recent imagies as possible. you wont get it exact, but you should be able to play with those red and blue sliders untill the rings look whiter, and planet not obviously red or blue. its been a while since i had the spc, but careful settings can produce a colour every bit as accurate as a DBK. the only difference is, it has to be done with two channels ( red and blue ) and you dont get a colour grapth to line up. to make the balance easy, as with a DBK, but when we had the discussion recently when i said a touch less blue. you agreed ( you saw it yourself ) tweaked it. and it looked better. thats what you need to be doing at capture with those red and blue sliders. if you have any kind of auto colour boxes, first just say default. then untick all autos. then balance the red and blue as described. by setting default, hue will be set correctly. messing with hue is a no no. and often leads to strange colours like this. set to default. you can then get johns image. and mess with those reds and blues Stuart. if this doesnt work. im afraid the colour will just be a bit hit and miss. often with strange colours ? if you do the colour more neutral at capture. not sure if theres a save settings function. if there is i suggest you do that, to keep track on the experiments. But i cant remember, its been ages since i used a spc.Not sure if this is helping ? I might be wrong but that looks like a seriouse hue problem, and or it looks like blue is almost completely missing ?

[cgarry]

Thanks Chris, I'm using 5.5x giving f27. The same problem occurred at f15..sometimes the image is not yellow but brightness does not seem to make any difference. My best image taken at f27 with a natural colour was straight after a yellow image with exactly the same camera settings and capture software.

I agree with Neil, something is very strange if the colours vary without auto-white balance or auto-colour enabled somewhere. For me the auto-white balance setting works okay so long as the image is not too dim. Not sure if it is much help, here are some images from the various steps for one of my captures:

A single frame from the captured 4 minute AVI:

[Philips SPC 900NC PC Camera]

Resolution=640x480

Frame Rate (fps)=10.00

Colour Space / Compression=I420

Exposure=-4

Brightness=64

Contrast=32

Saturation=3

Gamma=0

ColorEnable=255

BacklightCompensation=0

Gain=63

The output from RegiStax (Stacking the best 1000 or so frames):

The processed image (with the colour pushed too far!):

As I said, I am not sure if the above images help you at all but it could be useful to see what other people's less glamorous, intermediate images look like.

Cheers,

Chris

[rwg]

Robin it was just a short error message but there is no sign of a dump log file. I tried again last night, did one 6 min capture then selected the drop down menu containing focus, histogram ect and suddenly got the dreaded blue screen crash

Ahh, the blue screen - I can't do much about that one. I'm sure it would go away if I removed the code that allows me to put the gain/exposure etc in the right hand panel rather than just showing the video filter dialog like most apps do, but then the whole point of SharpCap vanishes. It does seem to happen on XP rather than Vista/Win7 which makes it hard for me to pin down as I no longer have an XP machine

cheers,

Robin

[Space Cowboy]

well that really doesnt make any sense unless you have a auto white balance. Or colour. other than that. your camera shouldnt be changing its colour mind ???? under exposure can alter colour balance somewhat. but thats not what your saying. Hue should be set to default, red and green sliders set so the colour balance looks as close to Johns recent imagies as possible. you wont get it exact, but you should be able to play with those red and blue sliders untill the rings look whiter, and planet not obviously red or blue. its been a while since i had the spc, but careful settings can produce a colour every bit as accurate as a DBK. the only difference is, it has to be done with two channels ( red and blue ) and you dont get a colour grapth to line up. to make the balance easy, as with a DBK, but when we had the discussion recently when i said a touch less blue. you agreed ( you saw it yourself ) tweaked it. and it looked better. thats what you need to be doing at capture with those red and blue sliders. if you have any kind of auto colour boxes, first just say default. then untick all autos. then balance the red and blue as described. by setting default, hue will be set correctly. messing with hue is a no no. and often leads to strange colours like this. set to default. you can then get johns image. and mess with those reds and blues Stuart. if this doesnt work. im afraid the colour will just be a bit hit and miss. often with strange colours ? if you do the colour more neutral at capture. not sure if theres a save settings function. if there is i suggest you do that, to keep track on the experiments. But i cant remember, its been ages since i used a spc.Not sure if this is helping ? I might be wrong but that looks like a seriouse hue problem, and or it looks like blue is almost completely missing ?

I am so stupid! All this time I've been using auto white balance. I never noticed the colour sliders because they were faded out! So I should be using freeze white balance and then moving the sliders! You see I never had any trouble with Jupiter so never thought there was a problem with auto wb.

Thanks for clearing that up Neil!

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks for your info Chris that's certainly a great image!

No worries Robin at least I can use Sharpcap for it's focussing tool even If I don't want to risk losing captures.

[cgarry]

Excellent, It looks like you have got to the bottom of the yellow images then Stuart. I'm looking forward to seeing your next Saturn image now.

Cheers,

Chris

[Looking Up]

Good image despite the yellow menace & poor seeing, the detail is good for the conditions! Your next one's going to be bang on I'm sure!

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks fellas! Tried again last night but sky was hazy cloud.

[Pete Presland]

I agree with Neil, something is very strange if the colours vary without auto-white balance or auto-colour enabled somewhere. For me the auto-white balance setting works okay so long as the image is not too dim. Not sure if it is much help, here are some images from the various steps for one of my captures:

A single frame from the captured 4 minute AVI:

[ATTACH]54309[/ATTACH]

The output from RegiStax (Stacking the best 1000 or so frames):

[ATTACH]54310[/ATTACH]

The processed image (with the colour pushed too far!):

[ATTACH]54311[/ATTACH]

As I said, I am not sure if the above images help you at all but it could be useful to see what other people's less glamorous, intermediate images look like.

Cheers,

Chris

great stacked image really shows the benefit of the stacking process