Hi Folks,
This is probably a niche question(well 2 actually) but maybe you can help. I have recently purchased Skywave Collimator for my 6"RC as part of the procedure you need to defocus the telescope by a certain amount from the best focus. I have manually been doing this at present (still in the midst of the collimation procedure very time-consuming). So at present, I center on a star run autofocus and then manually enter the new focus position. goto that focus position and take an image. I then revert back to the pre-determined best focus position. After reading about filter focus offsets I thought this may be an avenue, I don't have a filter wheel but could I add a filter wheel simulator and add in 2 filters, one to run autofocus on and then switch to filter with focus offset for the defocused position to image with?

The second question, So assuming using the dummy filter wheel removes the need for me to intervene, the second step in the collimation procedure is to take 8 images around the image center. At the moment I have the coordinates of where to put the star around the image and to build an automated sequence I would use the scheduler and manually create 8 separate jobs using the RA/DEC co-ordinates of where I want the star. Is that the most efficient way to do this?

Thank you very much for reading.
Clear Skies!
Lenny.

Hi Lenny,

Using the filter wheel sim should work I believe. Just set filter 1 to Autofocus, offset = 0 and filter 2 to be "locked" to filter 1 with an offset of x ticks (whatever you want), but don't set filter 2 to autofocus. So when filter 1 is set, that will trigger an Autofocus. When filter 2 is set from filter 1, the focuser will move x ticks. Note you'll have to do this from a sequence rather than just the focus tab.

For the second question you could explore the mosaic planner with a 3x3 grid. It will create 9 jobs, 1 for each position that could run the sequence for filters 1 and 2. You could manually delete the central job (leaving 8 remaining) if you don't need that.

You can try all this using simulators in the daytime before trying it at night to work out any issues ahead of time.

HTH

Lovely! Thanks for the that John. I will give it a go after work