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INDI Library v2.0.6 is Released (02 Feb 2024)

Bi-monthly release with minor bug fixes and improvements

How do I make Ekos just keep trying all night long?

  • Posts: 96
  • Thank you received: 25
So it was intermittently cloudy last night and I had to keep poking Ekos to try align, try guide, try capture. What I'd like to do is set up a schedule and have Ekos do its best to capture as much as possible. The greedy scheduler does a pretty good job of picking good targets accounting for my local constraints.

Once I've decided that I want to try for these 3 or 4 targets, I don't care if it takes 50 tries and 1 and hour to finally align on something - don't stop trying to align after a few attempts. I don't care if it takes a hour to find an acceptable guide star - just keep trying until a star is found or until it's time to switch to the next target. It's easier to throw out 65 garbage frames in the morning than it is to hop in my time machine with my cloud control laser. I assume I just missed something and am interpreting the reschedule/completion settings incorrectly... help?
The following user(s) said Thank You: Konstantin Baranov
1 year 6 months ago #86489

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  • Posts: 225
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Chris,

I've been using StellarMate for the last couple of years.

My experience is that it works marvelously during cloudless nights. For instance, last night I took over 180 subs between two targets with almost no skipped captures.

However, I continue to struggle with intermediate clouds appearing through the night. What usually happens is that guiding eventually aborts (which is fine), then capture aborts. What happens next seems to be almost random... sometimes guiding will begin again, then capture, etc. Most times guiding begins, and capture doesn't start up again. Rarely, it kicks it back to the scheduler and restarts the job... which I really wish it would. It's forced me into being a "fair weather astronomer".

So, I feel your pain. I don't know if other products (NINA, SGP, ASIAir, etc.) have these issues... perhaps others will chime in. I've invested a lot of time and effort into SM and really like the functionality. I've expressed my opinion before that I would prefer that they focus on this issue as a priority rather than adding more features/functions. Like you, I don't mind in restarting the schedule when there is an issue of any kind. It takes just a few minutes to restart, slew, focus, align and restart guiding/capturing. IMHO, this is an area that needs less finesse and increased simple logic.

I look forward to other's comments.

Ron
1 year 6 months ago #86501

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I agree. New features are nice but i would prefer current features to be 'bullet proof' first. I would love to fully automate my present setup but until the scheduler can handle dome slaving and rescheduling of jobs due to bad weather it's not really possible as yet.
1 year 6 months ago #86504

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Jasem,

Any chance that some focus could be given to address cloudy night stability?

Ron
The following user(s) said Thank You: JuergenN
1 year 6 months ago #86541

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1 year 6 months ago #86577

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