Hello relicsraage,

Thanks for trying the Bathinov Mask Assistant Tool. Sorry to hear that you have problems getting a good flare. I didn't change anything to the exposure mechanism, so the fact that you have trouble getting a good flare should not be related to the Bahtinov setting. However, if it might be a result of my implementation, I sure will look into it.

You can try the following things to see if that resolves the issue:

1. Select another detection algorithm (e.g. SEP or Gradient) but leave your Bahtinov mask in place and try if you still can't get a good flare. The detection algorithm has no effect on the exposure, only on detecting a star. With another detection algorithm Ekos won't be able to detect if the focus is right, but it will show that the exposure problem is not related to the Bahtinov detection algorithm. If it does affect the exposure, then I sure will look into it. Then something must have gone wrong in my software implementation.
2. In the focus tab, in the image preview area there are several buttons. One of the buttons is the auto stretch button (a dot with 4 triangles around it). If you press that button, the image will be stretched and that will probably show the flare that you expect. If the button is unpressed, then no stretching is applied and the image looks very dim (not much stars are shown, that could probably be the cause of the absence of the flare).

I hope these answers will help. If not, let me know.

Hi all,

Since yesterday afternoon (4th of May 2020), the Bahtinov Mask Focus Assistant have been integrated in the main branch of KDE/kstars. So it is now available for everyone and will probably be available in the next release of kstars.
Good luck using this feature. Let me know if you have any questions of encounter any problems regarding the Bahtinov Mask Focus Assistant.

Kind regards,
AstroRunner

Cool! I can't wait to try this out on my StellarMate!

Cool! Me neither!

Looks like it's working for me. Seeing was terrible, btw.

Hello again, thanks for the tips. I was able to get the flare with considerable zoom at 1.5 seconds exposures.
By comparison using the live view in Ekos the flare was bright and large regardless of zoom level; but using loop with the Canon...was quite dark using FITS or Native settings.
Nothing to do with this logic addition as this seems to be normal with my Canon.
Thanks for including your video Herrhausen, It did help.

I will try my asi183, if there are stars tonight.

Quick question , can you add this flare vector to the live view for DSLRs?

Thanks

Hi,
Unfortunately the flare vector can't be added to the live view. The other star detection algorithm results are also not available in live view. To make this available requires quite some restructuring of the code to make it work. Maybe it can be submitted as a feature request. But I think the live view was not intended to support this behaviour (but I could be wrong here, as I am quite new to developing to kstars and ekos).
Regards, AstroRunner

You're correct. The Live View does not support these features. I suppose some features can be added but it requires quite a bit of work.

Thanks for the replies. For the amount of effort required, not worth the reward.
As this is now, it will work best for me when I move to automated focuser.

Is it posible to use the Bathinov Assistant without a motorized focuser? How? I've been able to see the assistant working on previous version occasionally, but since I've installed 3.5.2 I haven't been able to get the assistant working.

The Bathinov Mask Assistant is in operation!    Oh wow!   I'll have to look for it!

Right now I do this (a link to my post in this thread):  How I use the Bathinov Mask
 

+1 for the non-motorized focuser. Is it possible to do that? Cause I can't see how it could be done