Ran all night last night with Beta 13. All major processes worked perfectly, again remarkable since I had 25 mph winds.
New feature to set Event as current event worked perfectly. Nice.
New feature to prominently display IMAGE MARKED AS BAD is not displaying the message with the correct image. Shows up on images that are not marked bad. Focusing on image makes message go away. I think a little smaller font would work just as well. The current font is really big and somewhat distracting.
Amazingly good results with autofocus on my RC8". I left autofocus on all night focusing after every center, since my early manual focus runs were working well. It performed 7 automated autofocus runs with no failures (moving way out of valid focus position). The only change I know of from prior night (when it was tending to shift my focus way out of range) is that I installed a focal reducer that reduced my FL from 1624 mm to 1260 mm. Very acceptable looking V curves considering the high winds.
Question: In the discussions on autofocus that mention a ‘central obstruction’, why does a central obstruction have any effect on the focus routine? Is it because it is assumed that the mirror moves for focusing? What is the focus routine doing differently if ‘central obstruction’ is checked in the autofocus setup? Since my RC does not use a movable mirror for focusing, does this apply to RC’s? In the Beta 13 notes you mention ‘Disabled smart focus movements for scopes with central obstructions’. What does this mean? Is this perhaps the reason my focus runs were much better with 13 than with 12?
New Feature categories are a big improvement to the forum. Structures the New Features entries very effectively. Well done. … So what if you dumped all my requests into the Archive category. Just kidding.
Possibly. The problem with smart focus is that it can get scopes that produce “donut” stars into trouble with its corrective behavior. This means, that if SGPro decided it needed more data points on the right, it might move your scope into “donut-land”. Our focus algorithm is not able to effectively determine centroid on these types of stars. When I say “effectively”, I mean that we can do it, but it is too computationally expensive for whole image metrics. When you say that you have a central obstruction, we are temporarily disabling the smart behavior and making the assumption that the data gathered was pretty close to focus to begin with. In a future release, you will probably see this option go away as the focus routine becomes more tolerant of different conditions.
I will take a look at the bad image marker. Are you saying that if you mark an image as bad, the next image that appears also bears this moniker (until you click on it)?
I could not discern a pattern for when it was displaying the BAD moniker. There was no apparent correlation with image bad or not. This happens when cursoring left or right through the images. BAD would show when it wasn’t. Clicking on the image makes the moniker disappear. I checked to see if it was basing it on the prior image. Was not.
This is exactly the behavior of autofocus that works perfectly for me. I would like to see this as an option that I can always choose (to disable smart behavior), since I always start with a manual focus that I know is good, and my carbon fiber tubes don’t require much change in focus over an entire night. I’m fairly certain this change is why it worked so much better for my RC8 last night than before. Particularly if this really means that it is not going to try to make any big changes in focus position.