Hi all 
i m using ekos on a Steallarmate plateform, rpi4, on a not permanent pier
I m using ekos scheduler to run jobs throught the night on clear skies. 

Last night, it starts ok but after one hour, passing clouds appears and killed my guding. . I wait one hour , stills cloudy, so i pack all the rig into home and go to bed . and of course , this morning full clear sky   (since around 2am..)

i was wondering how to deals with passing clouds to pause the scheduler and restart it when clouds have go away 
i test with simulator and weather pluging openweather. 

if i run a job and force a bad weather situation , job is aborted and scheduler is stopped
but when i reset good weather , the scheduler need to be relauch, there seems not to have an automatic restart. 

Is there a means to achieve  this so that if sky is clearing during the night , scheduler can relauch jobs ? 

before i buy a lunatico cloud watcher , i would like to now if i can use it to max my observing hours 
i ve got another queston on scheduler and guiding with passing clouds, but i will create another post  


thanks 
floren t
 

That's an excellent question Floren. In Ekos, there is a pre-emptive shutdown and hard shutdown. The pre-emptive shutdown closes down the dome and park the mount..etc until the time is suitable to start observing again. However, when it comes to whether alert, the scheduler goes to hard shutdown, so it doesn't check yet if the weather improved to resume its operations. This would certainly be a nice feature to have in the future.

ok , so when clouds coverage is occuring during night , it lauch an hardshutdown of shecduler (and ekos if option check).


But how do people using ekos in remote observatory to relaunch the scheduler ? they have to connect to restart ?
is there a linux cmd that we can use to relauch the scheduler so it can be in pre emptive state waiting for clear sky ?

You can always reluanch the scheduler directly like you started it. Right now it does not re-evaluate the weather conditions to decide if it needs to continue. Actually, this area can be quite complex to be fully automated especially given risk to equipment, so it was left to the operation discretion to restart the process whenever they deem it safe.

Hi Florent
I have a similar setup to yours and I solve the problem differently. I simply use the recovery functions of capture and the scheduler, which works quite well:

• Capture is configured with aborting when guiding deviation > 3" (limit depends on focal length)
• Scheduler uses "Aborted Job Management" setting "Immediate" with 120 sec delay
• Guiding setting with "Lost Star Timeout" of 10 seconds

If clouds pass by, the guiding star typically gets lost. After 10 seconds, capturing will abort, but the scheduler will retry a couple of times to restart guiding. If this fails, the Scheduler job aborts. After 120 seconds - with the aborted job management setting, the scheduler job will be restarted.

With this approach I gathered about 2h frames last night with high clouds passing by.

HTH
Wolfgang

Hello
i tried your setting last night and it works like a charm
Scheduler jobs keep rescheduling when clouds are passing throught my target.

The only thing is that if guiding is retry several time before aborting the job i can get a lot of deviation on the target and no alignement is restart.
If job is aborted , i think there is an option for that

florent

There are two options under EKOS >>> Scheduler, one for re-aligning before job start and one for re-aligning on guiding calibration failure. Give them a try...

Wolfgang,

I am very interested in your solution. I've had cases where clouds go over and guiding aborts, but I don't abort capture... I just delete those lights later. Then when it starts guiding again, the alignment is off. Would you mind giving a bit more detail on the whole solution? I didn't realize that your could stop capture and have scheduler start it again and realign.

Any pics of your settings/screens would be helpful... this sounds very promising!

Ron

Hi folks, please check  this thread  for a brief description about the setup for partly clouded nights.