I'm using Skywave (SKW) collimator to precisely collimate my 8" RC. In order to do so it is important that I capture a sequence of 9 defocused stars. 1 in the centre of the frame and the other 8 distributed around it in a circle. (see attached image)


Someone in the SKW community has created an excellsheet that easily converts to a N.I.N,A script to automate the entire process.
The user navigates to an acceptable star and focusses the image.
The scrip then offsets the focus by a fixed amount (SKW tells the user what the ideal defocus should be and if it's Intra- or extrafocus).
The script then takes all 9 images slewing to the new position after taking an image.
It ends by offsetting the focus back to ideal position.

I'm wondering what would be the best way for me to achieve a similar result in EKOS.
Since collimating with the software is an iterative process, anything I can do to speed it up and make it more consistent would help me greatly.

The excel sheet to calculate the locations of the off-centre stars is originally hosted on the innovationsforeseight website (www.innovationsforesight.com/support/skg...umentation_tutorial/)
But since the link doesn't work for me today, I've added a download link of my own.
e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZdqB9ZJ...loY2rTKc865qp57P854X

Thanks, Remco

If you manually slewed to the star, plate solved and then defocused, I suppose you could setup a schedule with 9 or 10 jobs. The 1st taking the center image, the next 8 taking the ones around the loop, and the 10th taking the center again. Each job would have plate solving, focus and guiding disabled and would just slew to a target and capture one image. They jobs would be identical except for the RA/DEC and target name. It wouldn't re-focus at the end, but that's not a lot of effort to do manually.

Wouldn't that work?

If you wanted to automate generating that schedule, you could generate a small version of the above schedule manually one time, e.g. with just one or two points on the circle, then manually text-edit the .esl file, copying the <job> ... </job> section, and if wanted write some python to generate that section with the right target name and RA/DEC coordinates.

BTW, this would only work on a Windows machine. Isn't that right? I assume that you'd also need to run some Innovations Foresight software, and their stuff typically only runs on Windows. Is there a Linux solution?

Thanks Hy,

I'm not sure why I didn't think about editing an exciting.esl template. That would make life a lot easier.


Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a similar tool that works on Linux.
I've heard nothing but great things about the results SKW collimator provides. But the software isn't really intuitive and I feel I'm short a PhD or two to fully understand the accompanying documents. (or their license options )

As far as I understand, the main value (and costs to the consumer) is in the ML algorithms that they've created for different telescope models. Maybe they would be open to licensing those to other developers. But AFAIK this it for now.

Thanks again.
Clear Skies