The “Auto Guide → Settling Options” allow you to specify how many seconds the guide star should settle for.
II am requesting the ability to specify the number of guide images instead.
I normally use 4 second guide exposures and want the guider to settle at less than 0.8 pixels for two exposures, so I set the For _ seconds to 6 which guarantees it’ll cover 2 exposures.
However, when I need to increase guide exposures to, for example, 10 seconds, I need to remember to manually change the For _ seconds value.
I’ll have to think on this. We don’t really control the frames with PHD2. And if I recall correctly PHD2 is even doing the settling. We basically tell it how long we want it to settle for and when PHD2 has decided it is settled it tells us we’re good. But it’s been a while since I’ve been in that implementation.
Can SGP query the guide exposure length? If so, it could easily multiply it by the number of “settle frames” to get the total time, then pass that to PHD2.
That was my thought. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we get the exposure back from PHD2. The best we could probably do is extrapolate the time between guide frames and make a guess at what the exposure time is. It would be somewhat of a hack and honestly not sure how beneficial this would really be.
PHD2 is where the settling happens, we’re just passing it the parameters. The assumption is PHD2 knows when it’s settled and will then start the timer after the settling has completed. I can’t imagine you’re getting much more settling behavior with 2 frames than you would with 1 (basically a non-zero time).