Hi all,

I'm working on a project to try and improve focus for setups that include telescopes with a central obstruction that cause stars to deform into donuts when out of focus.

As those of you with these types of rigs know, if you keep the focuser under a tight reign things are generally good, but if the focuser strays into donutland then you get problems. This is what I'm trying to improve.

I'm looking for some volunteers (with a rig containing a telescope with a central obstruction). If you'd like to volunteer then I'd need you to run autofocus with some tweaked software (available now) and gather up data (log files and focus frames) and send the data to me. I can then use the data to test improvements to Autofocus.

The process will be iterative in the sense that I'll probably incrementally try and improve things over several cycles. You can participate as much or as little as you like / or the weather allows! Every little bit helps. Things won't be too onerous; for example, run the modified software for a couple of autofocus runs at the start of an evening, then revert to your usual setup for the rest of the session.

If you'd like to volunteer, reply to this post or message me your email and details of your rig and I'll setup an email group to take this forward.

TIA

In, you have my email. Lousy weather for a while, though.
Hy

When you say run the modified software, do you mean kstars/ekos. as in a different binary? Id like to help. Im already running a modified binary until the changes in differential slewing are incorporated into a release. But I have a 304mm RC and would love to see this fixed as well. My V curves are closer to a line due to the tight constraints. It does work, but often fails to focus. It's very moony out right now so a good time to test stuff like this.

Im running Ubuntu 23.04 on X86_64.

Thanks

Bryan

Hi Bryan,

Thanks very much for responding. My changes are in Ekos. They are unmerged at the moment. If you know how to pull an unmerged MR and rebuild your system you can do that now. If not, I'll get it merged into bleeding-edge soon and then hopefully the changes can go into the next stable release at the beginning of Feb.

If you send me your email I can add you to the group. If you don't want to post it publicly, send it to me as a private message.