SharpCap 2.7.1885 Beta

This build brings a lot of new improvements in the Live Stacking feature, including…

  • Alignment and derotation tab – Alignment is now enabled by default (and can be turned off on the alignment tab. Alignment requires at least 3 stars to be detected in the image – if 2 or less stars are found then the frame is not stacked, so turn this off for non-astro images.
  • You can tick the ‘Highlight Detected Stars’ check box to see what stars are being detected. Yellow highlighted stars are being used for alignment, other detected stars are highlighted in red. Adjust the minimum and maximum star width and try the reduce noise option to alter the star detection parameters.
  • The levels of the stack view can be adjusted by changing the black level, grey level and white level sliders on the histogram page. Also the gradient slider can be used to increase the maximum slope of the levels transfer curve. Note that when the stack is saved these levels adjustment are *not* applied to the saved file.
  • Apply a dark field subtraction to each frame before stacking by selecting a dark frame on the darks tab (note: only PNG files can be loaded as darks at the moment).
  • Filter stacked frames by FWHM – turn this option on on the Filtering tab and then set the maximum FWHM to be allowed. Frames with a FWHM bigger than this will be dropped.

All of these features are very new, so please report any issues that you find. The UI for controlling these features needs further improvements – please just work with it for now!

As always, builds can be found on the downloads page.