How could I pause one sequence to continue on another last night?
Just stop it and continue the next day. If you talk about memory voyager sequence have not memory, paradigm is time slot that give better data.
All the best
Leonardo
Thank you Leonardo for your quick response.
If one night I do 30xL + 10xR + 10xG + 5xB, and 5 photos of blue are missing, can I stop the sequence and continue the 5xB another night?
Best Regards
Alejandro
Alejandro, if you do 5 blue in another night the possibility to do damage in terms of data quality instead to continue in your scope of finish the sequence is really more high. Better to do little slot of image for filter and repeat more time and stop the sequence when you have get enough data. Specially for color. But this is my experience, you are free to work how you want for sure.
Voyager paradigm is for time slot and repeat, actually no memory is inside Voyager sequence. Answer to your question in anycase is yes, just:
- open the sequence and save as with different name
- remove the finished slot
- scale the blue slot shot number to 5
- start the sequence
All the best
Leonardo
It was just a simple example.
In reality there are objects that need many hours and therefore several nights to make all the filters.
If you organize the sequence to do filter repeats, the procedure wastes a lot of time refocusing on each filter.
If you organize to take all the photos of each filter, some filter will not finish and will be half.
Could a pause or stop be added in a future version, to save the sequence and let voyager when opening the project again know which part is finished and which part remains to be done?
It would be easier for long-running sequences, and it doesn’t seem like a complicated function to implement … and I think it’s elementary in automation software.
Best Regards
Alejandro
Hi Alejandro, time for focus is never lost time. AP is not a race against something in our vision.
Voyager not work in this way now and we don’t think is an elementary things. So sorry about.
All the best
Leonardo
In AP, the ideal is to make the most of the night, which is limited. The more data collected, the more photos, the better. Optimizing time is important.
Voyager is great software and does very complex things. I was surprised that it lacks a simple pause and continue.
Best Regards
Alejandro
Hi Alejandro,
I have been asking the same thing when I first transition to Voyager from other programs, but now I am used to it and I don’t need for such feature that much (it’s still a neat thing to have I think).
For your example here, you can break your sequence into something like 5L+3R+3G+3B and repeat it forever. You re-focus during filter changing but it’s not really a “loss” of tme as Leonardo pointed out. It’s good to have a more frequent re-focusing, especially it’s fast with Voyager. You also have a more “evenly-distributed” data across all filters over time; in case you have very different condition over a few nights, it might help perserve some “consistency” for the data.
The problem is if you have a bad night that the sequence is always interrupted, then you restart with L everytime. You end up with a bunch of L frames, but to be honest you probably don’t get good data in such night…
Still, I would love to see sequence memory in Voyager, still a good thing to have. Just saying that I can live without it.
Yizhou
Dont lack … is your opinion that we respect but not our phylosophy.
Voyager aim to good data not be fast. So many other competitors run in terms of fast because is young and smart, we have 15 years of experience in AP and long session running and we have decided for this paradigm. We are working on many things to enlarge the way to work but also for mantain our vision of things.
Again sorry,
Leonardo
I don’t understand what you mean by “good data” or “fast data” or “a race”. It seems to me that Voyager as automation software, and with the good quality of the software that it is and very powerful and stable, it is strange that it does not allow something so simple that it facilitates more flexibly to organize the data acquisition in several nights. And it would also be very useful for mosaics with multiple sequences.
Thanks for the answers.
Best Regards
Alejandro
Voyager goal is to collect the best data and not more data possible. We don’t think the night in AP is a race against time so we have chosen to work in this way.
Thanks to you
Leo
The quality depends on the optical quality of the telescope, the quality of the filters, the quality of the focuser and a good focus, the quality of the camera, the quality of the mount and the good guidance … and the quality of collected data: add long exposure time, especially on weak objects.
The software is only for management, and if the philosophy is to achieve quality, it must allow to organize the work to achieve a lot of exposure time that can extend beyond a single night. This is not a race, it is optimizing.
It is true that to maintain good quality it is necessary to refocus several times throughout the night, because a filter changes, because the temperature varies, or because the optical train can slide … but not more times than necessary, because the routine refocusing is time consuming.
We have few useful nights alongside the moonless night, and you have to make the most of it to take good photos.
Voyager is a software that allows you to automate and optimize your work, to automatically take photos, filter changes, and the necessary refocusing … and many other things. But if Voyager forces you to refocus too many times, you don’t gain quality, you lose time.
And if every time you have to stop and continue you have to edit the sequence again, it doesn’t seem very efficient to me. And even worse if you make a mosaic with several panels.
The logical thing would be to save the work with the information of the work carried out and the work that remains to be finished.
I bought Voyager license because I thought that was the purpose of the software and it performed better than other software.
In addition, Voyager offers very good support listening to the needs of users.
Adding that simple function would be very useful for all users. Voyager is great software, but this is a feature that should improve.
It’s just my opinion, and I’m sorry to insist, but I think it’s very reasonable.
Best Regards
Alejandro
As a side comment, having used Voyager exclusively for data acquisition over the past 9 months I throw far fewer frames away than I have before. The time taken to refocus is more than offset by the higher percentage of keeper frames.
I tend to have only a few repeats per slot but then repeat the set and will do the same over as many nights as it takes. I end up with a fairly balanced total at the end of it
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I don’t know that there needs to be too much concentration on regular refocusing, given that it is configurable. How often Voyager refocuses is up to the user. In my case I use two scopes, a short refractor that is quite stable and if the temperature of the night is reasonably stable it probably focuses three or four times in a night, but I also use an SCT and it needs regular refocusing as they are very sensitive to temperature changes, but you can not just use temperature as a focus trigger as the OTA takes time to stabilise. If you looked at it purely in the number of subs lost to focusing it looks like I am loosing a lot of time with the SCT, but I get more high quality subs than I did before so for that scope it is time well spent.
Not having sequence memory I initially found a little limiting, but it does not bother me any more, I aim for around 100 good subs on a target with my older camera and 70 with my newer one (Which has a much nicer noise profile, both OSC cameras) so I run an image grader at the end of each night and if I had 90 good subs with my older camera I change the sequence to give me another 20 on the next night (To give me a choice of the best 10 to make up the 100 total) before moving on, be that to a new target or another panel in a mosaic. I found myself manually intervening night by night until I had enough subs that I was happy with when using the other software anyway. The only real difference IMO is doing the sums yourself in how many extras to do and changing the sequence rather than grading the subs yourself and having the total of the bad ones re added automatically to shoot again.
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