Go back and try again Focus Option

I think we have all seen it. You are watching a focus curve run and something happens (wind or
other unusual behavior) and you know the result will be less than what it should be.

Right now the only choices are to let it finish and then have it repeat (“run again”) or cancel and have it go on with the (probably poorly focused) sequence. Or abort totally and run a manually triggered autofocus. None are optimal.

I think we would all like to see an option that basically says “I know something went wrong, just go back and start autofocus over right now” then go on with the sequence.

This is especially important for narrowband where focus can be very slow.

4 Likes

This has happened to me many times. A great suggestion +1 for me. It ties in to a requested enhancement I made a couple of years ago for a focus quality factor, which I will summarize here:

Why not display a focus quality measurement. This is most likely already a number being calculated internally by SGP when it determines the best fit for the intersecting legs of the focus V curve. The enhancement would:
a) display this Focus Quality Number for each focus run
b) allow a minimum focus quality value to be set, default to none.
c) if the actual focus quality value is worse than the minimum chosen, rerun focus X times.
I would think that this could be implemented very easily and be fairly easy to debug.

This is less of problem for me now that I am only running 1 refractor, since almost all of my focus runs are, what you might call, perfect. A usual 10 hour night of imaging gives me about 7 close to perfect focus runs, none of which I would choose to rerun. However, even now, about every other night I have one that if I am watching it, I rerun using the manual (currently the only available option) process described by @CCDMan.

However, when I was using the RC12 it was really a big problem. Probably 1 out of every 3 focus runs were bad enough to require a rerun. Since I am adding a 12" Newton to my rig this spring, that issue may return.
This would be a very welcome and simple enhancement.