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Anyone using Sharpcap to do their polar alignment? I just spent hours trying to get it to work for me. It seemed to have a lot of trouble doing a plate solve, even though I could see a couple dozen stars in the field. It would say it detected 35 stars and was working 15 and it would give a time it took to solve, but it would say "last plate unsolved". I would have to fiddle with the exposure and gain to finally get it to go on to step two, same thing- it would go through thousands of frames before it solved one for step two, then it would give me nonsense adjustments- "up 10", then the next it would say "down 8" … anyone have any idea what I am doing wrong?

Guess I'm not downloading the update just yet....

Yuh Tom, you know the saying- so simple a 5 year old can do it but I'm stumped!

Bruce, contact Tim...he seems to be the club Guru on Sharpcap.
I am also new to it and wrestled with it the first night same as you. After a while I got it working (can't remember the settings) and was successful getting PA. then the next night I fiddled with it and for some reason the stars (many) were represented on only 1/2 the computer screen!! The top half of the screen was black while bottom half showed many stars. Very strange. Anyhow, I found you need to be pretty close to Polaris to get started. For something so simple (so they say) I found it not so. Going to review the utube videos on it though.

I find the default setting work best for me.
You need to be within 5 degrees of the celestial pole to start with.
You can also try increasing the exposure time until the plate solves adequately.
Increase you minimum star width to at least 4 pixels. This will prevent SharpCap from locking onto noise.

Thanks Tim, i did finally get it to work at stellafane, first problem was not being close enough to the pole. Second lesson learned was when at the correction phase, it doesn't solve every frame so you have to make a small adjustment and wait until the next frame is solved before making the next adjustment. I'm sure it will go quicker after I've done it a few times

Im glad you got it figured out. Im really hoping I can start attending meetings again soon.