Moonlight Questions

Sequence Generator Auto Focus
1

Okay I have culled through a bunch of auto focus threads but thought I would just go ahead and ask.

I’ve read all the chapters in the SGP Manual on setting my Moonlight focuser’s and have done all the things that it teaches you on how to get your step sizes.

Couple of things.

Do all of you go through all of that each time you go image or do you have a basic step setting that you run with each time you go out and image?

The reason I am asking is that every time I run auto focus on any of my ML focusers, and I get my nice V curve and let it choose it’s focusing position, I can always go behind it and tweek it by hand to get my HFR much lower than the routine is giving me.

It’s gotten to the point that I don’t trust it to give me the best focus. It looks to be running correctly and I have spoken to Ron about it but in the end I still take it and manually adjust it to get my focus. It’s as if I’m using the Auto Focus routine to get me close and then I take over and get it to where it needs to be.

I have to be doing something wrong. It’s a pain because I want to go to bed and let it check focus from time to time but I’m scared to let it go.

Are there any tutorials or posts out there that you know of that talk about all of this and if so can you share where I can find them?

Thanks in advance.

Sean

2

If you are using Crayford version of Moonlite instead of NiteCrawler and you have not yet enabled backlash compensation, you might want to try enable backlash compensation.

If backlash compensation does not help, then the focuser might be slipping a little bit and you may have to tighten the tension of the drawtube.

Peter

3

Oh okay. I’ll have to check that. Thank you

4

just be careful not to overtighten the tensioners - i managed to break the sleeves on the bearings once by tightening too much. mcmaster-carr has replacement bearings…

5

Yeah Ron over at Moonlight told me that a little bit goes a very long way when tightening those hex screws. I’ve never opened up the Moonlight program and monkeyed around with the settings in there. I’ve always thought that the drivers or whatever in SGP were handling it all.

I’m gonna have to do some reading on it. At least now I know their is a fix for it.

Thanks for the input