Dave’s Solar System Recorder (DSSR)

Dave’s Solar System Recorder (DSSR) guides your telescope and controls your video camera to let you automatically capture video clips of the Sun, Moon and planets. These videos can be processed to produce mosaic images or time-lapse animations. The MultiExposure feature also lets you create HDR images and animations.

Current features include

• CapTrak – capture and guide from the same video camera – no need for a guide scope.
• WinTrak – guide on a third party video window.
• PointTrak – guide on point objects like stars, asteroids, planets, planetismals, Jupiter’s moons.
• FeatureTrak – guide on features like craters, prominences, active regions, sunspots, comets.
• 3 separate autoguide methods – pulse, motor and goto – as well as manual guiding.
• Support for parallel processing for faster guide target recognition.
• Monitor target drift without applying corrections.
• Calibration of scope/camera combination.
• Graph window to show guide error and mount tracking error history.
• Screen desktop recorder.
• Mosaicker – automatically record the video tiles to produce large mosaic images.
• SmartTrak – maintain guiding while guide target is obscured by clouds, trees, etc.
• WDM cameras – captures using standard Windows camera drivers (webcams, Imaging Source, etc).
• Can guide on ANY camera.
• GEMTrak – guide using GEM mounts.
• AzTrak – guide using Alt-Az mounts (currently Celestron and Skywatcher only).
• Sub-pixel guiding.
• MultiExposure – automatically capture multiple simultaneous videos with different camera settings.
• MultiCap – automatically capture sequences of videos from different parts of the Sun, Moon or sky.
• AutoExposure – keep video brightness levels constant to compensate for atmospheric phenomena (clouds, mist, absorption)
• US Naval Observatory C3.0 Astrometry routines (high accuracy mode).

Features in development

• Support for Meade alt-az mounts.
• Live frame stacking and video processing.