I use temperature-based AF, but sometimes I notice my HFR creeping up without the focuser’s temperature sensor reaching the required delta to trigger an AF.
When this happens I do:
hit Pause Sequence / keep current frame,
wait for the sub to complete and SGP to pause,
run AF manually by clicking Run in the AF module,
wait for AF to complete,
click Close on the AF Window
resume the sequence.
I think it would be nice to have a button–perhaps in the AF module–to run AF automatically after the current frame completes. In other words, flag AF as being required as if the temperature delta had been hit.
If we had this I could simply click the button and go on to other things knowing that SGP was going to take care of running an AF ASAP without interrupting the sequence or requiring me to watch and wait, and without losing any imaging time.
+1
I often find I have to do this too. I select “Autofocus every ‘1’ frames” during an exposure, then I have to remember to de-select it during the next frame (which I sometimes forget until the autfocus runs again before the next frame…) A one-click button implementation would be easier and more elegant.
What is need is AF is performed using the same logic as you do. That is refocus if the HFR is increasing then at a certain % increase in AF is triggered.
This is not generally true. It can be a bad idea to create triggers based off of HFR (we go through this about every 3 months or so). Deviation in HFR is fairly meaningless because an HFR representative of good focus can change over time based on environmental conditions and altitude. That is to say, an HFR of 1.4 at one altitude and 45 m later an HFR of 1.6 could reveal absolutely no change is focus (or it might…). The bottom line is that a trigger based on this will just add support costs for a feature not all that useful.