Hi All,
Happy new year everyone!
I spend my Christmas holidays well, I have been developing a Bahtinov mask assistant tool for kstars/Ekos. It is still under development, but the sources are already available on GitHub. I have forked the kstars project and created a branch where I develop the Bahtinov mask assistant tool (as part of the Focus tool from Ekos) see:
github.com/prmolenaar/kstars/tree/bahtinov-mask-focus
For this project I first did some research on how to detect the Bahtinov star pattern in an image and then step by step integrated it into Ekos. As there is no simulator yet that generates the Bahtinov star pattern, I depend on a clear sky to test if it really works. So far the skies were very cloudy so I haven't been able to test the software yet. I will try that as soon as possible. When the implementation is working properly I will create a request to merge the changes back to the original kstars project.
I hope this will give other people some hope that the Bahtinov mask focus helper is on its way. I you like you can give it a try (download sources, build it and run it) and post the result on this forum.
A short tutorial:
- Start kstars / Ekos
- Connect your ccd
- Select Focus tab
- Select algorithm "Bahtinov mask"
- Select a star
* if you have a bahtinov mask on your telescope and a bright star in view, then a Bahtinov star pattern should be visible.
* if the software recognizes the Bahtinov star pattern, it will draw lines over the star pattern en circles on the center and on an offset to indicate the focus
* also the FHR value is set the the calculated offset, which also updates the graph
Good luck experimenting with it, and please be aware that the drawing of the star pattern on the image is not tested yet, so it might not work properly yet.
The other focus algorithms haven't been touches, so they still work as before.
Kind regards,
AstroRunner