So today I decided to put Ekos to some testing after all the modifications (almost daily!) that have been going on for the last few weeks. This was a good exercise as I discovered a few issues and fixed it right away. However, one issue that required a new solution was the
In Sequence Focusing feature which automatically checks the HFR after each capture and see if it exceeds a user-configurable value, and if it does, then it initiates the autofocus routine. The initial autofocus routing was done while using the Luminance filter (L), and if it is run again in any other filter (HA, R, G, B..etc) then the autofocus results are disappointing and I end up with an out-of-focus frame! So there must be a way to tell the autofocus routine to stick to some filter when performing the autofocus process, and I made changes in the focus module to reflect that.
Of course, folks can still leave the autofocus routine run in whichever filter was set the Sequence Queue in the CCD module, but for folks in my case, I'd like to stick to a single filter. The weather was a bit windy and the temperature was 40 degrees Celsius at midnight!! So I wasn't expecting spectacular images, I only cooled the CCD to 10 degrees above zero. Anyway, it was a good test run, the guiding was spectacularly smooth with the lodestar, it looks like I got my polar alignment quite well this time. I'll leave you with some screenshots from the session.