Feature request: rotator functions

[Chen Wu]

I’m a beginning user of NINA from SGP/Voyager. It’s so exciting to see new functions coming in every release of NINA.

For the rotator part, it would be even greater to consider the following:

1. In sequencer, is it possible to have one dedicate instruction to rotate to an arbitrary angle, either mechanical or sky angle. The function is handy when people doesn’t want to use plate solve to move the rotator. Also, it helps the user to move to a fixed angle after the whole session is done. Priority wise the absolute sky angle as a user input field would be best as this associates with the framing.
2. After the rotator device is disconnected and reconnected. It seems the sky angle is lost but only the mechanical angle remains. It is understood that without plate solve the sky angle is meaningless. Under a dome setup or a longer setup environment, this value wouldn’t change. Users might cut the power but not change any setup. It would be helpful to know the last used sky angle and then relay to the targets fov with more ease.
3. It seems the angle within the target framing is being kept after meridian flip, which means a 180deg flip has to occur to pass the plate solve. This won’t be necessary in many cases. If users could have the option to ignore the 180deg diff during MF when they want, it would save much time and improve efficiency.
4. This could be a bug. When I included ‘center and rotate’ in my instructions of the target. The session continued to plate solve even before I finished rotation. I had to manually cancel the session, wait for the rotation to finish, before I was able to resume.

Again, it’s a great software with a lot potentials. Thanks for reading.

[Stefan B]

Hello,

1. + 2. Adding a dedicated instruction to move the rotator to a specific mechanical angle is not problem. In general adding simple instructions is no big effort due to the complete code rework I have done for the new sequencing engine. What is a bit more tricky is having the sky angle, as this needs to sync it at least once to know what the sky angle really is. I can however look into the possibility to store the last synced sky angle into the profile to restore it on next connection, and/or alternatively have an instruction purely to solve and sync the rotator (instead of additional center and rotation)

3. N.I.N.A. will never ask for a rotation beyond 180° for center+rotate as it doesn’t matter if the image is upside down. therefore after the flip the rotation will still be accepted

4. Which Version of the nightly did you encounter this? I noticed an issue with that and this was fixed a couple of days ago

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Hope my comments are helpful. I will comment further to the issue once the instructions for 1. and 2. are added.

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[Chen Wu]

Thanks Stefan for the quick response.

1. / 2. What SGP tries to do is to hide the mechanical angle but keep the last solved sky angle in the user interface. It wouldn’t work if one tries to accept it blindly after any setup change at the camera end as the starting point could be wrong. The workaround is to solve it once to sync the sky angle and then it would be back to normal. Users only see ‘sky angle’. What Voyager recently starts to support is to introduce an action like ‘plate solve and rotator sync’ to sync the angle if there is a need. It could be within the sequence or independently as an instruction. It seems only ‘sky angle’ is present but I could be wrong as I’m new to Voyager as well. I’d recommend having all of the features but one by one when capacity allows: #1 solve and angle sync as an instruction with angle tolerance; #2 solve and angle sync as a ‘plate solve’ option with angle tolerance; #3 move to an arbitrary angle (sky or mechancial, and treat mechanical angle as if sky if sky not available).

3. Yes, that’s cool about the safety check. What I was observing is after meridian flip, the system tries to rotate 180 deg in order to fit the sky angle set in the target sequence. Like you said, the image doesn’t matter which side is up. In addition, some setup has flexture and one side works sometimes better than the other side. The +/-180 deg tolerance not only helps avoid the new rotation, but also offsets the flexture nicely by doing nothing.

4. I downloaded last night so I suppose it’s the latest. I could attach the log if needed, but it seems quite long.

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[Stefan B]

Rotate by mechanical angle and Solve+Rotate are available. The former can be used to just move mechanically to a dedicated position the latter for moving to a specific sky angle which will automatically verify that too by solving

[Stefan B]

Removing version: 1.11 Nightly (automated comment)