Options to improve autofocus

Sequence Generator Feature Requests
1

I’ll first of all say that SGP autofocus seldom has problems on my system (10" F4 quattro, sesto senso AF, r/p feathertouch focuser) as I’m never short of focusing stars and I’ve optimised the parameters in SGP (step size, No. steps, exposure time, backlash, etc).
For me, SGP can have issues if, say, there is a fairly bright star (or a few) and those stars are picked up or dropped between each focus frame and the computed HFR can jump around and autofocus is at high risk of failing to find a reasonable curve.
In short, a few user-defined exclusion parameters would go a long way to further improving the robustness of SGP’s autofocus. I’m sure these have been raised in the past but am not sure if they will ever be in the development pipeline.
Possibilities:

  1. choice between mean and median could be helpful.
  2. mean (or median) with HFR exclusion beyond a user defined number of standard deviations (probably two SD’s would suffice).
  3. mean (or median) with exclusion of stars above a user-defined HFR.
    Just my two cents worth for an already great program that I’ve found very reliable.
2

I’ll add another autofocus option request to these. Autofocus exposures are rarely longer than a few seconds and shouldn’t require guiding. If guiding is active, each exposure can be forced to wait for guiding to settle before starting the exposure. This can cause autofocus times to be extended to be much much longer than it would take without guiding.

Recommendation: provide an option in the autofocus setup panel to disable guiding during autofocus.

3

Please see here: Auto Guiders

4

Thanks - I missed that option when setting up autofocus.

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