Hi Martha, The diffraction limit doesn't really apply because you are dominated by seeing which is larger. You'll likely never get seeing at the diffraction limit, but if you believe you might, you can just adjust your seeing in the calculation to the diffraction limit (making the CFZ smaller...~16+ cnts). About tolerance, I'd say that if you started with 5% tolerance, keep that (it's a tighter criteria for CFZ). I just didn't want you to use 15% tolerance if you think you're going to get 2 arcsec seeing. Better to avoid sloppy tolerance when the seeing is good.

Ok, it looks like your CFZ fits in less than 20 steps. That's a pretty small window compared to the available focuser travel! You're going to be pretty sensitive to donuts in the focus routine until you get a handle on where the CFZ is initially. That's could also make your choice of algorithm a bit trickier depending on how repeatable your setup is. If it's reasonably repeatable, linear or 2nd gen linear should be favored. If not, possibly polynomial will work better. That's a separate question however.

Your post started with a question about what to set the step size to. Now you know. Your CFZ is ~20 steps. If you use ~15 steps as your step size, you'll not jump over the CFZ with each iteration, and you also won't waste a lot of time hunting within the same CFZ. The issue that I see for you is finding that small range in such a large travel window. Others could probably advise you better on how to start the hunt, but you might need to initially loosen that EAF setscrew while you find infinite focus, and then reset the screw and then run the focus routine (only a 1 time event...after that it should hopefully be routine to find it). Take note of your EAF motor counts (in case you need to restore in the future). Your first focus is likely going to be the hardest!

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