This is an interim release that fixes a number of issues and adds some minor improvements to the live stacking functionality. Bigger changes to live stacking are coming soon, in particular much of the work for auto-alignment is done but there is still another week or two of changes and testing to do before this will be ready to release.
This release also contains a significant change if you have a ZWO ASI174 camera – ZWO have released a new version of their SDK which massively reduces the amp glow that has been experienced in the past with this camera when taking long exposures. The difference is really very impressive, as you can see in some test dark shots that I took here. The flip side of the coin is that the new operating mode for the camera that gets this noise reduction can only extend exposures to 100s. Overall I think this is a big improvement as the amp glow was getting pretty serious beyond 100s exposures with the old SDK. Update: A further ZWO update has extended exposures to 300s while keeping the noise level incredibly low.
Full changelog:
- Live Stacking – Enabled for webcams, now disabled while capturing, other tweaks
- ZWO cameras – updated SDK with much reduced noise on ASI174 models, better handling of changing exposures when exposure >2s
- Frame Timestamps – now more accurate as the timestamp is recorded as soon as the frame arrives and uses a more precise clock source
- Non-webcam AVI files should now view the right way up
- (Non Astro Feature) Stop motion animation support – select from the FX dropdown
- Bug fixes for some ASCOM camera drivers
- Try again to fix crash when ASCOM mount fails to connect
- Stop capture sequences if device is lost/disconnected
- Don’t allow resolution/binning/colour space etc to be changed during capture
- Fix other crashes from submitted bug reports
As always, the installer can be found on the download page.