Getting exposure time into project

[Mystic Hill]

Greg,

If I open and Imaging Project and go to Exposure Goals and Filters there are two places to describe sub exposures.  ON the left I had set Sub exposures to 1 minute (plop down scope, no guiding, best I can do). On the right I customized the exposure for each filter thinking that was necessary to get the objective "Ha-R-G-B composite - 8 hr total exposure time - composite SNR 25 - color SNR 25". There I left sub exposure to Auto. I made a schedule and saved the sequence to import into SGPro.  The result is all exposures are zero, not my expectation.

Changing the filter custom exposure time to 1 minute produced the anticipated result.

I guess I was thinking that if I had left "Auto" for the Custom exposure the program would calculated and used a non-zero number for exposure or maybe used the one minute setting from the left side.

Roy

[theskyhound]

Hello Roy,

Several thoughts: there isn't any need to customize for each filter unless you are going to force the total exposure time, SNR, or some other aspect of one of two filters to be different from the rest. It doesn't sound like you needed to do that. Also, I'm confused about the sub exposures you chose. It sounds like you forced the sub exposure time to one minute for all filters, and then allowed all of the filters to use auto? I would think you would want one or the other. So lets talk about how this works: the settings on the left are usually all you need, as mentioned before. The sub exposure time is best left at auto, unless you want to force it, maybe by not having time to align the mount. But that would apply equally to all filters, so just force the sub exposure time on the left for all of them. If your practical limit is always 1 minute, then consider making this the maximum allowed exposure in the settings for this system. The main reason to customize some filters is if you want to use a different binning, or exposure goal for some filters. Maybe you want binx1 for the wide band filters, and binx2 for the narrow band. Or you can't reach an SNR of 30 for one or more filters (as set globally on the left) so you lower it to 20 for them. When you customize a filter it should automatically adopt the settings on the left for sub exposure time as the default.

This is the first I have heard of an integration with SGPro. I created a generic export format in the hope that they and others might support it. They had substantial roadblocks in their way, so I wasn't sure it was going to happen. I'm glad to hear that it did. But I don't know anything about how they implemented it.

You are correct that Auto should have worked properly, so I suspect a bug. Might be in SkyTools. Might be in the export file. Might be in SGPro. If you could share the export file that you are creating for SGPro, that would help me better see where the problem lies.

[Mystic Hill]

Hello Roy,

Several thoughts: there isn't any need to customize for each filter unless you are going to force the total exposure time, SNR, or some other aspect of one of two filters to be different from the rest. It doesn't sound like you needed to do that. Also, I'm confused about the sub exposures you chose. It sounds like you forced the sub exposure time to one minute for all filters, and then allowed all of the filters to use auto? I would think you would want one or the other. So lets talk about how this works: the settings on the left are usually all you need, as mentioned before. The sub exposure time is best left at auto, unless you want to force it, maybe by not having time to align the mount. But that would apply equally to all filters, so just force the sub exposure time on the left for all of them. If your practical limit is always 1 minute, then consider making this the maximum allowed exposure in the settings for this system. The main reason to customize some filters is if you want to use a different binning, or exposure goal for some filters. Maybe you want binx1 for the wide band filters, and binx2 for the narrow band. Or you can't reach an SNR of 30 for one or more filters (as set globally on the left) so you lower it to 20 for them. When you customize a filter it should automatically adopt the settings on the left for sub exposure time as the default.

This is the first I have heard of an integration with SGPro. I created a generic export format in the hope that they and others might support it. They had substantial roadblocks in their way, so I wasn't sure it was going to happen. I'm glad to hear that it did. But I don't know anything about how they implemented it.

You are correct that Auto should have worked properly, so I suspect a bug. Might be in SkyTools. Might be in the export file. Might be in SGPro. If you could share the export file that you are creating for SGPro, that would help me better see where the problem lies.

Greg,

It appears that an exposure setting of Auto prints a zero into the xml file (uploaded as a txt file to meet forum restrictions) which SGPro reads as zero, of course. Forcing the exposure to be one minute did save as 60 in the xml and was read as such by SGPro.

My expectation was that Auto should have produced a non-zero exposure.

SGPro says yours is the only program that exports filters and exposure times; others only export targets. Also, SkyTools allows me to compose the image instead of forcing the catalog coordinates to be the image center.  Also, I appreciate exposure times per filter that have some reason behind them.

Attached is Skytool.png showing the exposure tab of the imaging project (Auto), the resultant xml export is the txt.  Forcing the exposure to be 1 minute was imported into SGPro as showing in SGPro.png.

Thanks for your help.

[theskyhound]

Hello,

My apologies for the long delay in responding. So it turns out this is likely related to a bug that has to do with the gain settings. It turned into a real rabbit hole, which is why it took so long. 

I am ready to release a fix for this soon in an update. But before I do that, I need some more info to be sure I have fixed the right thing.

Please open your imaging system, open the Camera dialog, and click Edit next to the gain settings. Please take a screen capture of these gain settings and post it.

For a project that is not setting the exposure times in the export file, please send a screen capture of the Scheduler window so I can compare the XML result to what is displayed on the Scheduler.