Sequence Generator Pro 3.1.0.153 Beta is Released for Test

Hello! Welcome to the 3.X beta for SGPro. As always, we aim to ensure that even our betas are stable, but please know that we do find bugs during this process. Please use beta conversation thread here to report issues:

This beta has three primary feature additions and then some misc bug fixes.

As always, you can find the beta here:

http://www.mainsequencesoftware.com/Releases


Restart on Safe

SGPro is pretty good these days at providing you the ability to shut down the sequence and protect your gear when it detects an unsafe condition (assuming you have a safety monitor). This feature will allow for SGPro to automatically restart after an early termination.

This feature should only be used if you have SGPro and PHD2 setup such that you can load a sequence, connect all gear, do NOTHING ELSE, click "Run Sequence" and have success. If you require other manual operations to start your sequence, they will not happen during restart.

To enable Restart on Safe you will need to select the option in the Tools>>Options>>General Options>>Restart Sequence when conditions are safe. You will also need a safety device connected.

When conditions are unsafe SGPro will run the “End of Sequence” options and then immediately restart the sequence and pause. This will almost certainly end up in a paused state where SGPro is waiting on the conditions to become safe. SGPro will wait indefinitely in this state and will require 5 continuous minutes (currently not editable) of safe conditions before it will restart (unpause) imaging. Because of this your “End of Sequence” options should be such that your equipment is in a safe position (mount parked, observatory closed, etc). If you fail to park or home your gear, it will continue to track while waiting for safe conditions.

When conditions become safe SGPro will perform a “Reset Sequence (Preserve Progress)”, select the target with appropriate start/end times and then run all of the normal “Run Sequence” events (cooling your camera, auto center, auto focus, starting guiding, etc).


SGPro Notification Center

This has been presented in a couple of other threads. See here: Upcoming changes for Notifications in SGPro - Sequence Generator - Main Sequence Software

The intent of the SGPro notification center is to provide a user readable log of recent events, warnings and errors. Some aspects of Astrophotography are complex and when your sequence fails it it not always clear why. This should go a long way in working to reduce confusion and aid in general troubleshooting.


RBI Mitigation for FLI

Apologies for the delay on this. Because of some fairly well founded rumors of an upcoming ASCOM driver for FLI, we had decided to let that software handle the RBI mitigation. When we learned the delivery of the driver was no longer likely, we went ahead and implemented it in our native FLI implementation. Here it is…

RBI mitigation for FLI is not on by default (not all cameras need it). If your camera does (if you don’t know, ask FLI to be sure), you can turn it on the normal FLI settings dialog. Located in the lower left corner, it offers the ability to perform normal RBI mitigation using “flood and flush” cycles. You can choose how many cycles to execute before each sequence frame. In addition, you can adjust the exposure length of the RBI frame (for flooding) and the vertical binning factor (horizontal binning is set the same binning as the upcoming sequence frame). You can also choose to run only flood or flush prior to exposure of sequence frames. Lastly, RBI mitigation does not take place before frame and focus, auto focus or plate solving. If you find that this prevents proper operation of these actions, please let us know.

A few things you may ask that we are not sure how to answer (we will work with FLI before release… if you know the answers to these questions, please let us know):

  1. How many cycles should I use? Not sure. If you can easily produce RBI artifacts, you can be fairly empirical about this process. Tweak this setting until they are no longer visible (use stretching to determine).
  2. How long should my RBI flood exposure be? See above.
  3. What binning should I use? As per FLI direction, we set the vertical binning to the value selected in the RBI settings. I would start with 4x4 as it incurs the smallest amount of reads from the camera. We need to validate that this statement is accurate (and why somebody would NOT choose 4x4).