So last night I was setting up with a new camera. I had to change the back focus spacers because my first attempt had coma.
What I then ran into was a situation where the stars were not in focus but bright enough that I could see one of them if I took a 5 second exposure.
Since I don’t know the actual step position where I will be in focus, I have to do it by trial and error.
With other software I can put the camera into a loop of 2 seconds binned 2x2 (or more) and perhaps even make a sub frame around the star I can see. Then while it is looping and showing the HDR or HFD I can push a (in/out) button on the focus controller module to see if it gets bigger or smaller and by how much. If I have a long way to go I can tell it to go in 1000 steps to save time, then I can reduce it to 200 steps to get really close and then do 50 steps to fine focus it. I can see a star profile and HFD/HFR number and see when it bottoms out.
Then I know I am in focus or really close.
I then stop looping the camera and run an auto-focus with success.
This method works great with programs that I have installed on my system. Either it is linux based Ekos and my raspberry pi, NINA on windows, SGP and TSX Pro. All of these let me loop camera and change step size of focuser “on the fly” so I can get this done.
So last night I gave up trying to figure out how to do this with Voyager. It was then explained to me that I can access the focuser control under the “commands” tab (I missed it completely) but while I see there are apparently single arrow < > and double arrow << >> to indicate small change vs bigger change, I don’t see anywhere to put a custom number. Eg, 1000 steps or 300 steps or 100 steps.
Seems I have to manually type in a number I want like 31000 then 32000 then 32500 then 32800 etc…
This will work but isn’t as good.
What I don’t see is a way to loop the camera. I asked Leonardo if there was a way to loop exposure and he said to use dragscript.
So now apparently I need to learn to do that. Unless someone else out there already has such a script or knows of a different way for me to loop exposure?
Sucks having to close out voyager and run a different competing piece of software to do these simple things and then come back into voyager. would like to stay within the same ecosystem the entire time.