Whole setup works nicely now, so I started taking 10 min subs of a nebula and it's starting to look great. However, I did notice some things that were a bit troublesome and was wondering if I could solve them.
- I noticed that after taking a picture and during the transfer (over wifi), the guiding stalls.
- I also noticed some subs to show moved stars, even though the guiding looks great (all settings like FOV are fine). Stars show up not as trails, but 2 dots so like short exposures on 2 positions and then stable on the last. So I was wondering if this might be related to the above, when guiding resumes it starts taking a photo, but needs to correct a bit more than normal? I didn't notice this on the graph though.
Would it be an idea for EKOS to notice this and maybe have a small pause before starting the taking of a photo?
I use this all the time, it's the "Delay" parameter in the Capture module. I set it to 10 seconds just to be sure that guiding is established OK after focusing and dithering.
EDIT: Maybe 10 seconds is a bit much, set it to whatever value you find works for you.
Ah ok, so I did use that one but it was set to 5 seconds. Maybe increasing it might help. Which, btw, brings me to another point related to things taking their time:
- When guiding gets over my limit (of 2") it stops like expected, but then wants to restart and my DSLR keeps being busy for a while or taking some quick shutterspeed shots before resuming a normal exposure. Could I built a delay for this in it as well? Or maybe the routine doesn't shut off the operation on the DSLR correctly..
I think I found out the problem of moved stars. Setting the delay works nicely, but when I have a Gremlin in my guiding and the exposure stops, it starts (I think) too fast when it thinks guiding is ok again. Maybe it's still moving just a tiny fraction too much but then the shutter is already open... could that be? And if so, could you built in a somewhat longer delay?
Yes, precisely. I think it's the same problem with the DSLR taking its time, so setting the delay in between taking photo's works great. But when it aborts, it doesn't have a delay. It would be great to be able to set that as well.