Last night after doing some fine tuning with the Bahtinov mask, I forgot to move the step size to 50 (had it at 10) and AF would not work. I saw it and changed it to 50 and it worked right-away!
Thanks John!
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There's a lot to go over here... thanks BTW!
-What I'm doing is keeping HA//Oiii from doing any AF... since it doesn't seem to work well.
-Single start with a Sub frame is much faster than Full Frame. But I'll give the multi-star full frame a shot.
-I'll up the Step size for a try, but I've found when doing the Bahtinov mask it goes too far and I end up reducing the step to get it right. True AF bypasses that when fine tuning. You can see in the picture I have it stepped down gear-wise.
-Yeah that Linear-1 Pass looking promising.
-Backlash, I really tried checking for it and I see the knob moving with even 5 steps. So I've left it at 0. I should test with a step of 1.
Here's what I did with the Sequence Queue. I have a Lum for the first row (that is missing), I deleted it after a successful Meridian Flip and Reset the Jobs so I wouldn't run out of rows
The Ha/Oiii will fail many times and either just quit and the whole process stops (unless I wake up and check I can loose hours of imaging)... or when it did work, they were very out-of-focus. So much so Pixinsight threw them out.
Here are my current settings:
I see the same. AF, then write it down (I keep a spreadsheet to calc the offsets from the Lum) and when I tested using my Bahtinov, I'm just not spot on. But I think I'm close enough... I think. Downloading the images now.
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Ok, after a few attempts at auto-focusing (AF), I'm going to try only AF on the Lum filter and using the offsets found on the initial Bahtinov mask focus.
What I'll do since I only have been imaging with my Ha/Oiii filters, I'll have one Lum image stuck in between the others at only 1 sec just to get the AF to activate on it and let the offsets take care of the others. I've found that using the Bahtinov on the 1# filter (Lum) that the others rarely need to be changed... maybe by a very small amount.
But the AF on the Ha/Oiii just seems to not nail it.
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After doing some searching around this is a known reported bug. Ok, at least I've not completely bonkers.
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Ok, I think I see the issue... while saving the coordinates into the Flag Window, they are not saved correctly.
After hitting Save Changes (or Add, the both do the same)... the values are not being saved correctly.
Same error for both JNow and J2000 values
Ok, back to this and now I want to get really precise and not fudge it slightly like I've been doing with flags.
I finally figured out we had a Mosaic feature... yeah, I know, where have I been?
But I noticed when using the mosaic panel, it gives you the coordinates of the panels built... nice! Now how to get these coordinates to actually work. I plan on doing the left side one night and the other. I'm also trying to work the Scheduler, but I still don't have this thing down.
Entering these coordinates still doesn't give you the real location... I understand the thought is it's a JNow vs 2000 issue.
using the CTRL-M still is not very exact, I've tried both and the location jumps a good deal.
Is there anyway to enter these values shown in the image as a reliable Flag location?
Right now I am using a Bathinow mask. It's simple, gets you spot on. Use the offsets per filter and you're good. But it means you have to physically get to your scope. I'm seeing after a M/F my focus is getting pretty poor. And at 2am, I hate having to get out of bed to re-focus So I really have to get the AF working.
And right not I'm only focusing Lum/Ha/Oiii. I'm actually not using Lum... turning out to be a waste of time for me. Ha & Oiii have given me great results.
Tonight, I'm giving it another try.
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Again, no logs, but I was watching the MFlip and I saw it was imaging while it was setting up the guiding... when Autoguiding was completed, the image popped up as I clicked over to the CCD tab. No big deal, just an image to throw away in Blink.