I’m hoping to read your thoughts on how you best go about setting up your sequences for a mono camera with filters or even with a more straightforward OSC!
As a starter, I’ll try to briefly outline what I do, having toyed around with many ideas:
- I prefer to setup and adhere to a single “master” sequence, as opposed to multiple seperate sequences for each target, or seperate sequences for different event parameters etc… As a first target in the list inside this sequence, I create a template that will serve all my Light events and their respective filters:
- I then create a second target, that will serve all my calibration files:
- I then use the framing and mosaic wizard to frame and select my actual target that I’ll be imaging and append the sequence with that target. I then proceed to copy the events from the Lights template to that target, in this case - M81:
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And that’s it, I can then repeat this copying action from the Lights template to any new targets, creating a running list of targets as I progress.
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For each new target, I can always return to the Calibration template, reset its progress and start a new calibration run if I deem it nescessary to get a new dataset, which, time permitting, can be wise to do for every target, especially flats.
I feel this is an efficient way to setup a single “master” sequence, but openly invite your feedback, as SGP can be immensely flexible when it comes to planning your workflow and this may not be as efficient as I think it is i.e. perhaps flat events should go after each light event to acquire them easily at the same focus point, without having to refocus for each filter to the correct point having finished with all the lights first. In that case, I could call the first target in my sequence Lights + Flats and delete the flat events from the Calibration “target”.
Couple of extra questions:
*I read from others who use such an example of events rotating in their target: LLRRGGBBLL and then dither once before repeating them again - this, as an attempt to minimise settling downtime between dithering every single frame and then waiting for it to settle can eat up a lot time under the stars. This seems like a sensible way to overcome that overhead.
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I presume that in such a case, one has already setup their focus offsets correctly for each filter (in the filters tab -> Set Filters window in the equipment profile), so that one is not losing time by entering an autofocusing routine on every filter change, but rather more quickly moving their stepper motor automaticaly by a predefined amount of steps to appropriately compensate for parfocality between each filter.
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In addition, in the example LLRRGGBBLL (10 events), I also suppose that when setting up the auto-guide tab in the equipment profile, one would set it to dither every 10 frames, so that on the 11th frame, a dither command is issued before the events repeat again.
I could ramble on about many more details, such as file naming keys, planning tools etc… but I’ll stop here as these are the main points to my workflow.
Many thanks, looking forward to reading how you approach your creation of sequences and happy holidays 
Minos