Version info & compatibility

Sneak preview release

The actual version is a prerelease in a functional, but not yet complete state. WIP is not VIP ! It rather means 'work in progress'. Since the first prerelease in Dec. 2023, now a few things have been corrected and consolidated, but there's still some way to go before reaching an official 1.0 version state.
So, be prepared for anything. Images may not look as nice as expected, strange error messages may pop-up, your computer might explode, an asteroid might crash into your house, whatever. Good luck !

FireCapture compatibility

The plugin was developed for FireCapture 2.6.08. The new, FC 2.7.x branch brought some significant changes in the debayering policy. To overcome this compatibility break, now two different plugin versions are provided. For mono recordings, there is no difference, but for working in RGB color, make sure that you have installed the right plugin version for your FC installation.

Some general aspects

  • The plugin most probably exceeds the original idea behind the plugin interface, which -at least I think so - was rather provided for smaller tools for quick manipulation of image data before recording them. In consequence, a few limitations cannot be avoided. They are not critical and one can live with them.
  • Because of the many parameters needed for operation, the plugin somehow acts like a 'state within a state' in the FC framework. There is a separate profile management, the GUI theme is of course the same, but the look and feel and the usage policies differ from the FireCapture style, etc.
  • Plugins generally are not informed if FireCapture shuts down. So there is no way to automatically save settings. Remember to do this manually, if needed (see chapter Administration)

History

I started with planetary imaging around 2016, but did not make much noteworthy progress in the first few years. During the virus related lockdowns in spring 2020, there was a long phase with extremely clear skies and a perfect Venus observation period with the planet high in the sky, and I tried my first UV filter recordings. I experienced the problem that the stream preview looked like the typical 'blizzard' screen which I remember from former times when TV program broadcast stopped for the night. Yeah, younger ones probably won't believe it, but there once was a time when there was no TV program during nighttime hours :-).
Finding the focus in these conditions was merely impossible. So I thought of ways of analysing the frame pixels in order to provide some quantitative values which might be helpful for that task. This was the origin of the first 'ImageInfo' plugin, and, as a side effect, it also meant my first steps in Java programming. It took some time to get at least a bit aquainted with the amazing complexity and feature richness provided by the Java framework. Step by step I replaced the first crude plugin attempt with a new version which employs more and more Java GUI components and features. In turn, also the central idea behind the module emerged from a pure focusing help towards a live stacking and processing plugin for planetary imaging. Further development happened in the usual on-off mode, with sometimes more, sometimes less resp. no time for working on the plugin, and soon several years have passed, actually 4 of them, until reaching the current state. And still the thing is not fully ready. But I am using it successfully here already for more than a year, so I decided to publish this prerelease despite its yet unfinished state.

(c) March 2024 Carsten Bauer