Hi All. In the south west of the UK we often get conditions with clear spells interrupted by passing cloud. I wish to let the system run unattended so it handles passing cloud and images as much as possible as permitted by the weather conditions. When high pressure dominates it can be safe to keep the system running through out the night, cloud or no cloud, but when low pressure dominates with predicted weather fronts approaching it is safer to shutdown.

There are many settings scattered around the system and I struggle to set them to manage intermittent cloud. Briefly my requirements are:
1) Only abort imaging and shutdown due to cloud if weather forecast is risky otherwise suspend imaging (job) and wait for clear sky to return.
2) On resumption of imaging, alignment is run before re-starting imaging. I find there can be considerable drift when guiding is lost, more than I would expect if mount continued at tracking rate during cloud.

I think the guider is well placed to handle cloud but would be interested to find out how people tune their settings to handle cloud interruptions?

Thanks
David

Hi David,

I act as my own weather station and only leave my scope unattended for the night if there's likely no rain.

For cloud, I leave the scheduler running and of course, guiding can't find any stars so stops and retries. I have had issues with guiding locking onto hot pixels in the past but that can be dealt with with the params. When the clouds clear, guiding "should" work and you should be pointing in about the right place because tracking will be on. I have Options->Ekos->Scheduler->"verify captured image position every 1 frame" set and a reasonable tolerance for my image scale and target. So the next sub is taken and plate solved... if its out of tolerance then the scheduler resets, aligns, etc. and goes again.

It doesn't work all the time. If there are a few, short periods of clouds it stands a reasonable chance. For long periods of cloud or lots of intermittent cloud its not so good and you're better off resetting manually.