Autofocus and exposure settings during live stacking...

[DogWatch]

Robin-

It has been most of a year so I was hoping to ping you on this issue for a possible feature request.

I have my autofocus working very well and all is good and consistent. I have it down to a few button clicks done in a set order...that being said, it would be great if these button clicks could be made into a 'behind the scenes sequence' triggered by a single button in the live stacking window.
My process is that I have the autofocus exposure settings as an 'Autofocus' profile and I save the current nights live stack exposure settings as "Tonight" profile. When it is time to do an autofocus, I pause live stacking, load the 'Autofocus" profile, pause PHD2 guiding, run autofocus, un-pause PHD2 guiding, reset exposure to "Tonight" profile, close autofocus window and then restart live stacking. Wash, rinse, repeat as needed.

As requested above, could this "sequence" be hard coded into a single button press from the live stack window?

FYI- Still loving Sharpcap... I have to admit to trying out NINA on several occasions "just because", but I keep coming back to Sharpcap due to it's powerful simplicity, live stacking and the fact it just plain works! Many thanks!

Chuck

[admin]

Hi Chuck,

yes, you should be able to set that up as a sequence - here's a first approximation

Code: Select all

SEQUENCE
    PRESERVE CAMERA SETTINGS
        LIVE STACKING PAUSE
        GUIDING CONNECT ABORT False
        BEGIN GUIDING PAUSE
            LOAD PROFILE Autofocus
            REFOCUS PROMPTROI False
        END GUIDING PAUSE
        LIVE STACKING RESUME
    END PRESERVE
END SEQUENCE

That has a couple of differences to what you suggest in that

* It doesn't use a 'tonight' profile - the 'preserve camera settings' step avoids the need - at the end of that step it restores the settings that were in place at the start of the step

* The 'Refocus' step runs an automatic refocus based around the current position - if that isn't quite what you want then there are various autofocus steps that you could try.

Note that I haven't tested this - just plugged together the steps that would form the basis of solving this problem in the sequencer. With a little more refinement then you could have this saved as a .SCS sequence and activate it very easily.

cheers,

Robin

[DogWatch]

Robin-

Thanks for pointing me in this direction...and for the example sequence. I have modified the sequence by moving the "Pause Live Stacking" and the "Resume Live Stacking" to be the first and last steps in the sequence. I was completely clouded out last night so I was unable to test it. As soon as the weather gods cooperate, I will report back and post a finalized version of the sequence for others who may want to use it.

If you ever get truly bored, it would be very slick to have this sequence set as a hard coding to a single button in the Live Stacking window... Or maybe a single button in the Live Stacking window that could be assigned by the user to a specific sequence for one-click convenience?

Thanks again!

Chuck

[admin]

Hi Chuck,

actually you can get pretty close to having a sequence on single click - once you've saved it as a .scs file, you can run it via Sequencer=>Run...

Having used that once to select the SCS file, the file will appear in Sequencer=>Run Recent to be selected as a recently run sequence file.

cheers,

Robin

[DogWatch]

Robin-

Was able to test things out last night and it worked great! It's surprising how nice it is to just hit the run button and have it do a complete refocus and restart the stacking... especially at 2AM.

Autofocus.scs

(319 Bytes) Downloaded 66 times

Thanks again for your help,

Chuck

[admin]

Hi Chuck,

glad that it worked - this sort of thing is the whole point of having the sequencing tool... It allows you to take little bits of functionality (each simple enough to be easy to understand and work reliably) and string them together into something useful.

cheers,

Robin