I trusted EKOS to get me through the night, and while it pulls through many nights, it didn't last night. Three issues, I've regularly brought up here, all hit me at once, while I slept peacefully. Haha.

The first, is an issue where the scope is issued a slew command to reacquire a target. In this case, it was the automated meridian flip. Thankfully, it executed as it should have. (it has been known to sometimes not execute). However, the plate solve began before the mount started tracking, leading to a blurred image that was trying to plate solve. It gets caught in a continuous loop trying to reacquire the target, capturing an image while it moves, and moving again. See next image:



Then, it finally settles down at the wrong spot, and thinks it's the correct spot for some reason?



If you see my before and after meridian flip image above, you can see I had M8 and the Owl Nebula centered in the imager. Once it ran through its plate solve cycle of hell it ended up in a very different spot, though it still captured 3 hours of only M8.

Finally, I have the focuser set to refocus every hour, and during one of the runs it magically fixated on donut noise, despite starting out a moderately decent FWHM of 2.8, it somehow got way out of focus, and decided that even though the focuser moved several hundred steps that it was still in good focus. See next screen.



I had even set the focuser to do full screen focusing, since I ran into the focus issue all the time with single star focusing.

In all, a disappointing night after 3 weeks of cloudy skies in the states. I know everyone works hard on this project, and I know it's a complex beast. I place no blame, but only post because these are recurring issues from before 3.0, that are still in place after a year of development. I sing the praises of EKOS where I can, but it's really disappointing to be bit by the same issues time and time again.

I will say though, that despite the issues experienced last night, this is only a 1 in 10 occurrence for me. So the other 9 times, it mostly runs flawless.

A 1% tolerance on focus seems excessively tight IMHO. I think you would require exceptional seeing to pull that off consistently. Maybe that is why it struggled.

I believe this is the default value, as I've never changed it. What would 2% net me? Something that's slightly out of focus, or just better tolerance for fine tuning?

I'm not sure what the default is. But it means it will continue searching for focus until the difference from the previous HFR is within a 1% tolerance.

Example, with HFR of 2.8, it will not accept a value greater than 2.828 or less than 2.772 as being close enough.

Edit: Correction, less than would become the new standard to reach.

I would imagine at 1% it's probably struggling against seeing effects. Seeing was around FWHM 2.8-3.8 last night, so average at best. It must have been struggling. Though focus was good for the first 6-7 hours, so even at 1% it was successful for most of the night. I'll widen that % a bit and see how it does. Thanks for the info.

is this 3.0 or 3.1-beta?

3.0

The final image from last night. I think I ended up with 4-5 hours of usable data.