I first imaged M31 for a few lights, just for the heck of it (and waiting for full darkness).
Then opened the schedule, ran that, checking if focus, align and guidibg went well. It did, so I went home and left it running.
Didn't explicitly open one of the fits.

Please can anyone from the developers indicate whether opening FITS files has an impact on the numbering or more specifically on the strange numbers when creating a mosaic?

Quote Hy:

1- Set each of the 4 mosaic tile scheduler jobs to have the same non-empty group name, and set each of them to have the "Repeat until terminated" completion condition. Of course, to set that you need to double click on a job (the + above the table turns into a checkbox), make sure those two items are set properly, then click the checkbox above the scheduler queue table. It's a good idea to then save that schedule to disk so you can re-load it the next time.

Why should one double click every job? If the "Repeat until terminated" option is selected and the group name has been given in the mosaic planner, the created jobs looks fine.

What is the advantage to double click every job to have the "+" changed in a "v"?

Essentially he wants us to make sure that each job in that schedule has 'repeat until terminated' checked.

(And yes, of course they are)

My hunch is that it has to do with some condition where the 'imager' tab wants to keep going to finish the x images in the sequencer, and at the same time, the scheduler (greedy?) wants to stop that job in order to keep the number of images of the (four) jobs roughly equally fast growing.
It happened before only with the first job, the subsequent jobs go on very well. That's likely because the 'number of required images' is equal to the number of images in those subsequent sequences. Except for the first one to start for that evening.

Cheers!

I just started a 2 x 2 mosaic of the Pelican Nebula
Each time 15 shots of 60 seconds, completely according to the instructions.



Fingers crossed !

Only one night and some quick processing, so there is still work to be done.
But conceptually the mosaic and stitching was successful...

That looks good!

Now I wonder if another night proceeding with this schedule / job group it would also 'just keep going'.

For me, the issue occured recently again, twice in a night.
I have the logs, but would any dev still like to help out please?

If you have 'Repeat until terminated' checked for all your tile jobs then the same schedule should continue to collect images for all tiles.

If you have verbose logs to share, please post links to them along with your description of what problem you're reporting in as much detail as possible. I've alerted Wolfgang who is more familiar with what I think you're describing.

Hy

Second night running with exactly the same 4 jobs, repeat until terminated enabled for all 4 jobs.

Yesterday there was no issue, but I purposely didn't "touch" any of the files during capture. I still suspect that as soon as the timestamp or other file properties of the saved FITS file changes, the process starts acting weird.

Please can someone from the developers explain what file check is happening before/after saving of each FITS file?

The code simply checks to see if there are files with the right file names in the right directory on disk and counts them. It does not look in detail at those files, just checks the file names

No offense intended at all, but perhaps an error has crept into the code somewhere.

Last night I started exactly the same 4 jobs as 2 nights earlier. And while nothing went wrong last time, this night I notice that job 2 took too many lights and stuck.

• Job 1 did run 5 times x 15 = 75 lights
• Job 2 did run 5 times and continues = 81 lights (!)
• Job 3 did run 4 times x 15 = 60 lights
• Job 4 did run 4 times x 15 = 60 lights

I don't understand at all why job 2 was not stopped after the 75th recording and why job 3 was not started after job 2 was done.

The monitor screen also looks strange:



Each job has its own color, but occasionally this color disappears. For clarity, I have given the jobs a red number in the screenshot above to illustrate this. Why is this happening?

In the logs you can see at 2023-09-12 05:30 AM that job 2 continuous (batch #18) in stead of passing the torch to job 3. For all completeness, these are the relevant log files:

@Fitchie,

It is much better if you submit log files instead of scraping the text from the log windows. There is a lot more info sent to the file than is displayed in the window. Also, one can tell the geography and the software being used, etc. Make sure the log files are set to verbose and check all Ekos modules. Usually those files are too large to post directly, so just gzip them and upload them to Google Drive or Dropbox and send a link.

However, in this case, I don't see any problem to look into (other than the color issue), so at this point I don't think logs are necessary. The mosaic tile-switching seems to have worked very well for you until about 9 minutes before it shut down for astronomical dawn. It wouldn't shock me if the system didn't switch jobs a few minutes before it was going to shut down anyway for daylight.

Hy