Satellite streak during Auto Focus Run

I am in the process of imaging Elephant Trunk Nebula and it’s going very well so far. During the middle of Auto Focus run I just saw a satellite streak crossing the image and it kind of freaked out the AF run. I saw SGP selected many points on the satellite streak and it caused HFR measurements to be quite a bit off. After AF run was done, I clicked on “Run Again” button and it was fine from then on.

I am sure that it would be difficult for SGPro to differentiate between stars and satellite streaks but I wanted to let you know of my strange experience. This could be something to think about in future release.

Peter

1 Like

This is true… there is not much we can do about this. That said, was your star count low enough that points along the trail had a huge influence or did the AF routine literally find hundreds of stars on the trail?

While differentiation is probably not an option (without dramatically increasing the analysis time of each image), one thing we can do is maybe start AF over if one of the frames falls outside of some range set by the other frames. I say start over as opposed to retake the frame because it might be the first frame with the trail and then SGPro would think that is it’s new standard. Anyhow, I don’t think it would be too hard and it would be like a type of “recovery mode” for AF.

I didn’t check for star count but looking at the image, there appeared quite a bit of stars.

Overall, the Sequence Run was once again quite successful. I have not image for three months due to many cloudy nights and lots of smoke from California fire.

Peter

I forgot to answer your other question. Yes, it picked quite a few “stars” on satellite streak.

I think it’s a good idea to automatically re-do AF run if something like this happens.

Peter

OK. Well, I moved this into feature requests for the star count analysis feature. Do you have logs so that I can study at least one example of star count increase due to trails?

Here you go:

Sorry that I do not remember when it happened but I clicked on “Run Again” after the AF run with satellite streak so you might find it quicker.

Peter