Last night I was running a sequence on NGC 3718. At 11 pm it was to switch to another target. I was watching it and it did not change targets. When I looked at the logs it shows that the end time was for the next day. The sequence had started prior to 11 pm and was on it’s third 10 min exposure. Here is the pertinent part of the log but I’ve also attached the entire log.
[3/25/2015 11:05:14 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Checking for auto manual focus (post)…
[3/25/2015 11:05:14 PM] [DEBUG] [Main Thread] PopulateDataModel: Transferring view to the data model…
[3/25/2015 11:05:14 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Attempting to find next event…
[3/25/2015 11:05:14 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Current event[0] frame count: 3/50…
[3/25/2015 11:05:14 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Current event event[0] has remaining frames. Returning current event.
[3/25/2015 11:05:15 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Current target has end time at 3/26/2015 11:00:00 PM
[3/25/2015 11:05:15 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] End time of next frame is at 3/25/2015 11:15:15 PM
[3/25/2015 11:05:15 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Target is still before end time, continuing…
[3/25/2015 11:05:15 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] Running capture event…
[3/25/2015 11:05:15 PM] [DEBUG] [Sequence Thread] ------------- Starting capture frame for event[0] -------------
I can’t reproduce this issue, but I think I have a good idea of what happened. The log shows that your end time started off properly at 2300 on 3/25. Then by the time it was inspected it had moved 24 hours into the future. My guess, is that you opened the target settings dialog between 2300 and 2305. When you closed it, SGPro’s logic is to set the end time into the future. Does this sound familiar or am I off base?
I may have opened the properties dialog but if I remember correctly, it was after it was to have changed targets. Maybe not. I guess I don’t know why it would move the date forward in the first place.
So just by opening the dialog box at the wrong moment caused it to reset the date forward? I did not adjust anything. So in that period after the set stop time and before it stops imaging to change the target there is a critical period where I should not touch anything?
How about foregoing the date altogether? There was only one upcoming 11 pm and I don’t think one would want to set the stop time for the next night when it is currently running. Maybe that’s just me…
Correct, you will notice that there is no date so we infer that. There was a small window where the target had not yet ended, but you were past the stated end time. In these cases SGPro figures that you want to end at the next occurrence of 2300. This is right 99% of the time. That said, it should not behave this way and need to handle this case. That’s what I meant when I said we had to think about it.