Feature Tracking "coexistence" and in action

[ChrisR Oz]

Hi Robin,

Finally had some weather for planetary imaging. Well almost - the first 2 days had absolutely terrible "seeing". Never seen Saturn and Jupiter dance and squirm so much. It's a small miracle to see something recognizable come out of AS3 + Registax. But last night was way better.

The Feature Tracking (COG for planets mode) is fantastic - works like a charm, and makes holding the ROI tightly around planets very easy with just mount tracking. I used to get the OAG going at an image scale of just 0.4" with binning, and almost no FOV for stars. This is WAY more convenient - it just works for hours. But I do have some questions and suggestions for it.

1. The drift plot is fun. But once it's all working, it would be nice to "hide" it, to reduce the width of the Feature Tracking window by half, so it fits with the main image display. I have played with auto-hide mode for some window. But I like it with all displayed better. But it gets crowded.
2. Feature Tracking seems to interact with SER acquisition in some way. At an exposure of 5 ms I get 117 FPS for a small ROI, limited by my old laptop probably. At 0.5s exposure I get 1.9 FPS as you might expect. At 1s exposure I get 0.1 FPS. Very odd, and only while Feature Tracking is active. In another post, I describe that the SER file seems corrupted in some way (or the frame data anyway).
3. A side effect of the crowded screen, is that I missed that I managed to move the red cross-hair without realizing. And so a couple of captures had Saturn way off centre (the other post on SER issues shows a couple of frames). I'd much prefer to have the red cross-hair anchored firmly in place. I know it doubles for photometry tools as well, it seems (have not read the manual on that yet), and I've used the circles to check collimation. But it would be nice to have a setting option to keep it centred.
4. Feature Tracking seems to (cleverly) take note of where the COG is at the time of enabling "Guiding" and keeps it there. This means to make it central, you need to first jog the tilt/pan controls a little to manually centre the ROI on the object before starting guiding. It would be nice to have a checkbox for "Keep centred" so it would grab it and move it to the centre and keep it there.
5. The "Status" line, at the bottom of the "guiding" tab information, shows very small values. These are clearly not in pixel units. Is this arc-seconds?
6. Before starting guiding the "Monitor" button is enabled. Once it is pressed, both "Calibrate" and "Guide" are enabled. But a Calibrate phase is not really needed (and it works going straight to Guide without it). Hence, perhaps in ROI mode, avoid confusion and don't enable it?
7. I can't get "Minimum contrast" working on Saturn, even with a nice histogram around 50%. No value but zero seems to be stable. I seem to be missing something here ...

Great tool. Together with the tools for Goto Coordinates (objects), plate-solve and sync/recenter, auto focus, and the camera profiles so you can have an optimum profile for plate-solve and sync, DSO, planets etc. makes for a very efficient and reproducible method. It's both fun and efficient/reliable.

Cheers, Chris.

[admin]

Hi Chris,

thanks for the detailed feedback - I will have to work through that one item at a time to make sure I understand what is going on (or going wrong).

Can I just ask with regards to the low frame rate (which seems to be the key bug as opposed to being an improvement idea)... Was the frame rate low when not capturing at these settings, or did it only drop down when capturing?

cheers,

Robin

[ChrisR Oz]

Hi Robin,

It only dropped down at 1s exposure when Feature Tracking was running. Switching it off brought the rate back up around 1 FPS.

Cheers, Chris.