Metaguide Compatibility

I use Metaguide and dither. It works well in that it plays nice with SGP issuing the dither command and Metaguide executing it, but I am wondering if it can be made to work better. Is it possible to read the settling error from Metaguide like it does with PHD, so that you can set a pixel error value to settle on for x amount of seconds? If this is not possible, a universal pause for X seconds on dither only feature would suffice.

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I am interested in more complete integration with MG as well. I use PHD right now due to it’s richer integration with SGP, but it would be great to have the option to use MG to it’s fullest extent, especially with it’s more responsive guiding. Maybe this could be one of the 3.0 features/improvements?

Along the same lines, I think the settling functionality in SGP could use some refining as well. It often seems to decide to settle between every frame, which can be highly detrimental to short exposure imagers using CMOS cameras. We often like to dither every few frames, rather than every frame, so having SGP settle every frame even if a dither (or focus) did not happen just burns up viable imaging time.

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I too would appreciate better integration with Metaguide. I live in a light polluted area and need to take thousands of frames when not shooting narrow band. With Metaguide I’d have to settle between each frame rather than only settling upon dither. This dramatically reduces efficiency when taking very short subs.

-Jim

Thanks for the interest everyone - and I’ll just add that I’m happy to help out on the MG side if it could make it easier to add more compatibility between SGP and MG.

Right now there is very good functionality that allows dithering and OAG autofocus and other things to happen automatically - and I really appreciate that SGP included MG functionality early on.

A lot of information is being communicated by MG over UDP, though it isn’t documented well, so it wouldn’t be hard for SGP to listen to what MG is doing.

And I’m happy to alter or add communication features to make things easier on the sgp side.

For the specific issue of dithering, I don’t mind just using a delay of 10s or so - and SGP does have that set up. But as jtrezzo mentioned - it appears to be invoked after every image, and not just after a dither - so applying the delay only after a dither would be a big time saver - and wouldn’t require communication.

Frank

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Any thoughts on this from the SGP developers? I really would like to be more efficient when imaging with Metaguide. Tonight, I’m having to pause for 10 seconds between 30 second subs to make sure that every dither settles down correctly. Ideally I’d only pause when dithers happen rather than every single frame.

-Jim