Category: News

SharpCap 2.7 adds a number of new features, particularly to the live stacking feature that was already in 2.6. Improvements to Live Stacking include:

• Alignment and derotation added – note: must be able to at least 3 stars in each frame for this to work
• FWHM measurement and filtering on FWHM score
• Flexible levels adjustment on the histogram tab
• Log of stacking info/events
• Make Test Camera available in released code for experimentation with these features
• Much improved handling of reading dark frames – will convert bit depth and 3/4 colour planes as required
• Add options to save stack as a dark or as viewed (ie including histogram adjustments)
• Now supports alignment in 16 bit modes

In addition to the live stacking improvements, there are a couple of other significant new features:

• Dark subtraction available for all Astro cameras – look in preprocessing controls. Note that this doesn’t include webcams (but you can use dark subtraction for webcams within live stacking). Also, don’t select dark subtraction both at the camera level and within live stacking. It won’t end well…
• Focuser position line drawn on focus score graphs if you have an ASCOM focuser selected. This helps you spot the focuser position where you achieved the best focus. Maybe this will form the basis of an autofocus feature in a future version.

Finally, there are the usual improvements to camera support. This time the big news is the addition of support for Celestron/Imaging Source cameras. Once again a big thank you to F1 Telescopes who were kind enough to arrange various sample Celestron cameras for me to work with – without which this would have been impossible.

Additionally, there are improvements to the support for the following cameras

• QHY cameras – new SDK integrated which will work with a much wider range of QHY cameras. Support for upcoming QHY5III cameras added. Support for QHY ColdMOS cameras coming soon. Thanks to QHY for help and sample cameras to improve SharpCap.
• Altair cameras – new SDK, updates to support upcoming new camera models and bug fixes. Thanks to Altair Astro for providing access to production cameras and development models.
• ZWO cameras – again, new SDK, bug fixes and changes to support new and upcoming models including ASI***COOL cameras. Thanks to ZWO for providing help, feedback and access to cameras to test and develop with.
• Basler cameras – updated to a new version of the Pylon SDK (5.0) and fixed a number of issues arising from some Basler cameras having slightly different names for controls like Gain and Exposure (sigh…). Also there is a new experimental option for Basler cameras, which updates a lot of the Basler code to be in line with the more recently supported cameras. I hope to add LX support to this experimental option in SharpCap 2.8 and then withdraw the old Basler camera code.

One more thing worth noting is that SharpCap 2.7 is going to be the last version of SharpCap that will work on WindowsXP. SharpCap 2.8 will require Windows 7 (well, it might run on Vista, but I’m making no promises and nobody uses Vista anyway…)

Finally, a bit thank you to everyone who uses and enjoys SharpCap, particularly those who take the time to report a bug, get in touch, like SharpCap on facebook or otherwise contribute. I’ve fixed dozens of bugs while developing 2.7 as a direct result of bug reports, so keep those coming!

This installer can be found on the downloads page.

Here’s a bit of a write up of the new features in SharpCap 2.5. You can find the latest beta builds on the downloads page.

Settings Dialog
I’ve moved a lot of the random menu options that controlled various parts of the program out of the menus and grouped them together in a new settings dialog – this can be found in the File menu. I had resisted having a settings dialog for some time both for design reasons (a settings dialog encourages more tweakable settings, which makes software more complex and harder to learn) and for pure laziness reasons. However, the improved options for output file naming really forced my hand, so now SharpCap has a settings dialog.

Capture File Organization
As I’ve just mentioned, much better control over where capture files are saved and what they are named. Previous version of SharpCap would save capture files to the Desktop by default (this was because in other capture programs the question of ‘where did that file get saved?’ often needed asking). This version of SharpCap changes that default to a new subfolder on the Desktop called ‘SharpCap Captures’. If you have previously customized the folder your captures are saved to, it will not be changed in the upgrade. If you have left the default of ‘Desktop’, it will be changed to  the new default. It’s now possible to get SharpCap to organize captures into either zero, one or two levels of subfolder by object name and date. This should make keeping track of captured files much easier.

Mount Control
if you have an ASCOM compatible mount (for example EQMOD), you can cofigure SharpCap to connect to it when a camera is opened so that you can tweak the mount pointing from within SharpCap. Currently control is fairly basic – left, right, up, down and a spiral search function. This may get further improvements based on feedback.

Improved Exposure Control
For cameras that give fine control over exposure (everything except webcams, basically), SharpCap now has a new, enhanced, exposure control in the UI. There are 2 modes of operation for this – normal and LX mode. Note that LX here has nothing to do with the LX modification for SPC900 webcams, it’s just an indication of whether the sliders etc are optimized for exposures of many seconds or minutes (LX mode) or milliseconds (normal mode). In addition to a slider (which is now wider to give finer control and has tick marks), there is the familiar text box where you can type in an exposure in ms or s and a new ‘Quick Picks’ drop down which allows you to select common exposure values easily – 1/30s, 1/15s, 10s, 30s, 60s, etc.

Full Screen Support
Want to fit that bit more preview area on the screen – you can hide the menu and toolbar and go full screen from the options menu. Just move the mouse cursor back to the top of the screen to re-show the menu in this mode.

Improved FITS output
Far more FITS header fields are now filled in when writing to FITS files, so programs like DeepSkyStacker will be able to pull the right information straight out of the file. This is somewhat camera dependent at the moment with the best support in ZWO cameras, but will be moving on to all cameras capable of long exposures as time allows.

Improved ZWO camera support
SharpCap 2.5 uses the new ZWO SDK version 2, which provides better control over the cameras, particularly for newer cameras and easier control of long exposures.

Scripting Support
SharpCap now has a built in programming language – IronPython – which can be used to write scripts to automate SharpCaps features. It’s even possible to add new buttons to the toolbar and have them run a script function when they are pressed. This is very much a geek-zone feature and is work-in-progress too. You should be able to do pretty much everything you can do by pressing buttons in the UI by using the IronPython scripting – please let me know about stuff that is impossible or just doesn’t work!

Bug Fixes
Yes, as usual a whole range of bug fixes and minor improvements and performance tweaks. But, this is a beta release, so it’s quite possible that I’ve introduced new bugs too. Do remember to do a quick test *before* going outside to observe, because I’d hate to be to blame for stuff going wrong for you on a rare clear night…

What’s not in SharpCap 2.5?
I’d really hoped to do a complete UI refresh after 2.0 – remove the menus and toolbar and replace them with a ribbon (like Microsoft Office). While the ribbon hasn’t been universally popular, I think it would be a good fit for the small number of menu/toolbar options that SharpCap has. This was going to go along with a change in the UI technology from Windows Forms to WPF. I even have a very basic application called ‘SharpCap.New’ that has the ribbon and can open and close camera previews, but it was just taking too long to make these changes. Instead I decided to add new UI in a more piecemeal manner (the new settings dialog, exposure control and mount control UI are WPF) and also concentrate on tidying up the code behind the scenes which will eventually allow for the big UI changeover to be made easier, as well as allowing the scripting feature to be added.

As usual, feedback on the new version is very welcome – please report bugs either using the builtin bug report form or by contacting me on the forums, looking forward to hearing from you 🙂

cheers,

Robin

In no particular order, the new features in 2.0 (compared to 1.5) include

• Support for QHY Cameras
• Improved support for ASCOM, ASI, Ximea and Basler Cameras
• Filter wheel support
• Improved focus score calculation
• Enhancements to the reticule – including the option of a circular one
• Automatic updates and bug reporting
• Dozens of bug fixes

The installer for SharpCap 2.0 can be found here

Getting SharpCap 2.0 out of the door is taking longer than I’d hoped. Right now there are only a couple of things left that I want to fix before release – these are

• QHY camera support – it’s working for a lot of cameras now, but needs some tweaking either in SharpCap or the QHY SDK for a few – feedback welcome!
• Auto update notification – nothing too intrusive, just a way for the program to check for a newer version online and give you the option of downloading it.

Hopefully I’ll get onto those fairly soon now (especially if the weather cools down a bit!)

Anyway, I’ve just finished working my way through a bunch of bug reports that have been uploaded and have managed to fix about three quarters of the reported problems, which I’m quite pleased with. The new (almost bug free?) beta build (1.99.744) is available from the downloads page.

Lots of improvements in this build

• Many small bugs fixed from crash reports received (thanks to all those who submit their crash reports!)
• Improved ASI camera support (you should be able to use the WDM drivers if you want now, as long as you choose the WDM driver as the first camera you open after starting SharpCap – If you want to switch between the Native and WDM drivers, close and re-open SharpCap)
• Improved QHY camera support – includes updates to the QHY SDK that fix a number of issues and support for the WDM drivers as for ASI cameras above.
• Updated Ximea SDK – may give some support for newer Ximea cameras (I don’t have a Ximea camera to test with, so can’t be sure…)
• Sensor temperature reported on devices where this feature is available (some QHY, ASI cameras)

Download from here.

I have been meaning to get round to this for ages, but been a bit busy recently… Anyway, there is a beta build of what will become SharpCap 2 available to download that should support the QHY5LII and other QHY cameras.

Sharpcap 1.99.623

In theory this build may support the following cameras :

IMG : 0S, 0T, 0L, 0X, 1S, 2S, 3S, 5S, 1E, 3T, 2P
QHY : 6S, 8L, 9S, 5, 5II, 5LII, 5TII, 5RII

At least the API that I am using supports the cameras in that list. I’ve only tested it with the 5LII colour – other test reports welcome. I expect it will work with the Mono cameras more easily than the colour cameras to begin with (the colour cameras will need me to wire in their bayer pattern to get raw modes working for certain).

I’ve just uploaded a new beta build for SharpCap 2.0

Improvements include

• A circular reticule is now available as well as the cross hairs
• The focus score calculation is improved – should give useful indication of focus now, just try to get it as high as possible
• Fix for Basler cameras not working in recent builds
• Fix for SharpCap crashing when connecting to a non-connected ASCOM camera

Things to note

• Don’t try using the ASCOM simulator cameras – they are buggy and may crash SharpCap
• New focus score UI coming soon hopefully

Anyway, here is the download. (The download link is now fixed).