After a full nights session, about 4am clouds rolled in briefly, during this time something happened to guiding when it stopped and later resumed. It picked up a new guide star, and the scope shifted a few degrees off for some reason. Because of this, I had about 2 hours of frames where my object was no longer centered. Is there any way to trigger a new sync and goto on the scope after it's lost guiding to ensure it resumes back in the same spot after the clouds go away?

Agreed. Could you clarify whether you are using the Capture module or the Scheduler module?

-Eric

I was only using the capture module.

I connected equipment. I had plate solved a few times to get the mount accuracy tuned in, picked a target and plate solved again, auto focused, started guiding, then added about 200 3 min frames to the capture module and started the process going for the night. Meridian flip went off without a hitch, plate solving re-centered the object. About frame 160 clouds rolled in guiding was lost for a few minutes on and off as the clouds passed. When it finally cleared of all clouds target was off center, and the rest of the frames were like this until I stopped the process in the morning.

OK thanks for reporting. You probably expect this, but in order to introduce a realign step in that workflow, you would need to use the Scheduler. This said, its current implementation behaves the same way, so no magic here. We will make the Scheduler more sensitive to guiding failures, so that a realign may be triggered if the situation doesn't recover shortly. "Shortly" is arbitrary here, so there will have to be a user setting for the maximum amount of time guiding is failing. Additionally it's not entirely easy to distinguish a stuttering cloudy guiding from a good guiding from the client side, but I've got that use case to my list anyway. In the meantime, if you use the Scheduler, you can divide your observation into smaller sessions that restart from scratch to recover from such transitory issues. That is of course a different approach to your imaging session.

-Eric

I had never thought about using the scheduler like that and breaking up the session into smaller chunks. It's an interesting solution.

How about this possible scenario: What if when using the scheduler and guiding is lost, an alignment routine is run. That alignment routine will continually fail until the clouds are clear. It could continue running that routine until it gets a clear shot of the sky, and the mount corrects its position. Once it passes the alignment routine and is within the threshold of accuracy for alignment, it resumes guiding and capturing frames.

This might be a better option than basing the failure and alignment routine on an arbitrary amount of time.

What you describe is exactly what happens right now. The scheduler will repeatedly attempt to process the job until a limit setting is attained. What it cannot do for now is recover a transitory, not definitive, but long enough, error condition as the one you described in the first post.

-Eric

I ran the scheduler last night to capture a set of frames, and for the most part it worked after clouds came by. However, it wouldn't wait for the mount to slew before attempting to capture and solve the current location. Since the mount was moving it would either fail, or think it was located somewhere it wasn't, and it kept screwing up the alignment. I had to reset the mount location, delete out the failed solves, and resolve to mark it's current position before continuing the sequence again.

This is a recurring problem with some mounts apparently. Use the settle field to introduce a delay before capturing the frame to solve.

-Eric