CMOS Cameras - Stacking many very short exposures

[Tõnis Eenmäe]

Hello!

I have few questions about methods, how it would be possible to control external programs from ACP. My goal is following: I want to use a CMOS camera with very short exposure times to do photometric measurements of bright stars. While it it definitely possible from camera side, one can not beat the Nature - 100 millisecond exposure through 8 cm telescope gives awful scincillation noise. Solution is "easy" - one just has to stack many frames. Effective exposure time of ~50 seconds is already getting there. But for that, 500 0.1-second frames must be stacked. When each one of them is 40 MB in size (20 Mpix cameras...)... well, probably there is no need to explain more.

Unfortunately, MaximDL is not helping here at the moment. However, there are other programs for that. I'm thinking currently about SharpCap Pro (https://www.sharpcap.co.uk/sharpcap/...ro/sharpcappro), that allows to do live stacking (buffering high-framerate images into RAM, doing preprocessing on the fly, stacking on fly), is remotely controllable/scriptable, and can save stacked output as FITS file.

Is there any good methods how to use an external capture program from ACP using e.g. scripts? Does ACP support directly Python scripts? Can such scripts be used from e.g. Scheduler?

With best wishes,
Tõnis