Rather than take darks on the fly as you start guiding, solving, focusing, etc, which is very problematic for anyone without an automated shutter. Is there any way I can build a master dark for each, save them to some folder, and assign them to each setting?
New feature request perhaps? Thanks! I think this would improve all modules considerably, plus night after night I stare at those grainy views and wish darks were applied. Haha. I’m not sure why you would want to take them at each session if we could save a master to use indefinitely.
There is a dark library feature. Darks will have an age, which you can set to an arbitrary number of days in the future. I enabled this by checking 'darks' in the autoguider module. The system took a dark once and now reuses it.
Not sure how you did it but you only need to select that once in a session and then not anymore in the consecutive sessions. Once the dark has been taken, it will be reused every time.
It would be much more convenient to simply point the software to a master dark (and bias, and flat) I decide is the one I want rather than trying to outwit the algorithm as it attempts to account for age, exposure, and temperature.
I take and process a lot of calibration frames as part of my imaging. I know what I want to use and when. I'd rather have the ability to just specify the calibration file of my choice.
Airscott. You can change the exclusion criteria. Extend the expiration period, and increase the temperature variance. Temperature range can be a pain with a non-temperature controlled camera.
The dark library feature is meant for use in the Focus/Guide/Align modules. It's not meant for use with Capture. You would be asked to take another dark if any of the following conditions are met:
1. Dark frame time expired (configured in options).
2. Dark frame binning and/or resolution is different.
3. Dark frame temperature is higher than the threshold.
4. Dark frame exposure time is different.
If any of these conditions are met, then it will ask you to take a dark exposure to be saved.
I use more than one Ekos client computer. After copying the dark library files from one to another the files do not show up in in Ekos' darks library (despite being owned by the same user and having the same file attributes). Any idea why that should be the case?