Patriot Astro's Shared Advanced Sequences (UPDATED!)

hey everybody chad from patriot astro welcome back i've got another nina related video for you today as i'm finally ready to share updated versions of my advanced sequences my previous release was pretty popular and i had quite a few downloads this release continues to improve upon the best practice methodology while adding in some additional features before we get started i just want to remind everyone if you find these videos and these shared advanced sequence templates helpful definitely share the videos with others and if you yourself haven't already please subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you know when other content like this becomes available and of course take a second to like the video so youtube's algorithm will pick it up and share it with others who have similar needs to your own as you should be able to tell by my videos i'm trying to reach as many people as possible to make their evenings more productive and much less frustrating and one last thing i've been asked about quite a bit since i haven't really had a chance to cover image processing videos yet i do take pictures too if you want to see some of my imaging go over to instagram and join me at patriot underscore astro and you can also go to my website at www.patriotastro.com alright back to the sequences i'm sharing with you today at a high level i've included a number of imaging sequences some startup sequences and a few extras as well the various imaging sequences i'm including are used to image your targets and are specific to your camera type and needs are you shooting mono lrgb or mono sho or maybe you're using one shot color without filters i've got you covered maybe you use filter focus offsets with your mono camera no problem there are versions for that too oh but wait you use a rotator or nina's manual rotator to get that perfect framing don't worry i've also included rotator options for everything i've mentioned as far as prerequisites go of course the latest version of nina is always recommended and as of right now that's nina version 20 beta which is what the 111 nightlys became from a hardware perspective they obviously all require a mount and primary camera to be attached to nina there is also an assumption based on instructions that i use throughout the sequences that you have an electronic focuser guider and for mono a filter wheel now any of the rotator sequences also require a rotator or manual rotator but other than the mount and primary camera the other devices while expected can be backed out if you don't have them later as an example i'll show you how you can back out guiding instructions if you don't have a guider attached so do you need all of these sequences well maybe or maybe not keep them all or just the ones you need don't be too quick to pull the deletion trigger though while you may think you always want to image with a manual rotator you may not want to wake up at 4 30 in the morning to deal with the rotation of that extra target you added at the last minute just to fill out your evening by the way a quick side note here if you aren't using the manual rotator yet within nina you should be video links in the description you'll thank me my shared sequences all have a consistent layout they all apply things like center after drift auto focus on hfr increase and dithering each one includes initial setup and use instructions stick with me here and i'll show you how the initial setup process goes for every sequence you plan on using the initial setup process is important for two reasons one you can customize defaults for your own hardware such as setting your filters by name defining the camera cooled temperature point and setting your dithering frequency plus configuring defaults for things like loop exposure lengths and counts i'll also talk you through defining center after drift parameters using some best practices since i'm seeing a number of people getting that one a bit wrong setting and saving your defaults will make your life easier moving forward because in most cases you'll be able to just select the sequence and click play reason number two you can modify any of these sequences to make them your own i went out of my way to make sure i didn't use plugins so these could apply to all users from day one but definitely feel free to add in your favorite plugin instructions like ground station's notification capabilities or buculum's intelligent look forward looping conditions if you have no idea what i'm talking about here i'll try to put some images on screen and links in the video description now before we get to all of that let me mention the other items i've included beyond these imaging sequences i've also included basic start and end sequences to help frame your knight the way i've built my imaging sequences make it where some of this may not be required especially at the beginning of the evening but when i get into this part of the video you'll see why you still may want to have or use a startup sequence as far as startup and end sequences go i've also taken the time to frame up a couple startup sequence templates that can be used on demand or added to your nina profile so they automatically are applied every time you open neenah one of these is intended for the typical imaging evening where you plan on imaging one or more targets sequentially another startup sequence i provided is for a night where you may want to loop a couple targets or panels over and over all night long like with some single night mosaic projects and the final startup sequence i've included is a complete sequence based heavily on jerry macon's fantastic sequence he's shared numerous times which includes dome hardware and ascom safety monitors that can automatically react to weather conditions throughout the evening now i won't be able to go into this one in great detail on this video because it probably deserves its own video at some point soon and finally i've also included a couple extra sequences you may find useful one is my exoplanet transit sequence that i use when confirming exoplanet transits this particular sequence and the previous dome and safety monitor sequence are the only two that i've included that expect or require plugins another extra sequence i included is one that will help you create bias and dark frame library for your camera and the last template is just a bit of fun where you can use a secondary instance of neenah along with an extra camera and maybe an inexpensive tripod to take time-lapse style images throughout an entire night all right enough of this let me show you how and where to get these sequences and how to customize them for your own system let's go okay the first thing you need to do is go over to my website at www.patriotastro.com once there you're going to click on the menu bar and then click neenah advanced sequence downloads here if you scroll down you'll see descriptions of everything that i've included if you click on any of the sequences an image will open of that sequence this allows you to look at what i've created prior to importing these same images are also included within the zip download once you're ready click on the zip file to download it to your system on most windows systems this will probably end up in your downloads folder while you're here feel free to look around clicking on the about menu option will bring you to my other social media pages like instagram and then i also have descriptions of some of my equipment that i use as well as a number of images that i post here when active my live all sky camera also shows up here although it's not active every evening i also have a number of other projects listed on my web webpage all of which have youtube videos associated with them okay when you're ready go to the downloads folder and open the zip file within the zip file you'll see multiple folders the documentation folder contains all of the sequence images that i mentioned earlier the patriot astro and startup sequence template folders are what we're going to move into nina at some point here soon right now let's go ahead and highlight the patriot astro and startup sequence template folders and right click on them to select copy now before we put them anywhere we're going to go ahead and open up nina within neenah first click sequencer and then advanced sequencer once here click templates you can see i have a default setup here right now i only have the basic options yours may look a little bit different if you've already built some sequences or imported my previous ones don't worry though on import i'm not going to replace anything you already have that's why i've created this folder structure to make sure that we don't overwrite anything you already have existing so the next thing we need to do is go see where your templates are installed for most people this will be a default location but go ahead and click options and then imaging and then over here look at sequence template folder now for most people the default location should be in your documents nina templates folder so let's go ahead and close nina and we'll go into our documents nina templates folder and you can see mine is empty i'm going to go ahead and paste those two previous folders here at this point you can open them up and look around if you want you can see all the templates are here and ready to be viewed within neenah so let's go ahead and open nina up again as soon as we're back in neenah we can go to sequencer advanced sequencer click templates and you can see we have everything here we expected you can see we have a start end folder we have our target imaging folder and then we have an extras folder before i get a million comments about this i'm completely aware that i spelled extras wrong i needed this alphabetically to fall in such a way that extras were at the bottom and out of our way the next thing i want you to do before we set up our initial configuration for these sequences and save the default parameters is i actually want you to connect all of your equipment now this is something you can do in the daytime or at night but i do want all of your equipment connected i want to make sure that all of the instructions that i'm using in these sequences have the appropriate devices available to us i'm going to go ahead and quickly connect my primary imaging camera filter wheel auto focuser the manual rotator my mount and my guider if you don't have any of this equipment that's okay we want to be able to see that in the sequence so we can customize it appropriately once we have everything connected we can go ahead and click sequencer again now the first one we need to look at is mono lrgb we're going to click and drag it into the main sequence area now i want to be able to go through all of these but really i only need to show you the first one in depth and then i need to show you the changes as it relates to the offset sequences and rotator sequences i'm not going to spend the same amount of time on all of the sequences moving forward but i do want to show you a couple critical things in the first couple we look at now that i have mono lrgb open i'm just going to quickly collapse the containers this will allow us to take a look at the typical structure you're going to see throughout all of my shared sequences you'll notice here i have the name of the container up top monol rgb and there's a target every one of these will include a meridian flip center after drift and restore guiding you can see i've got a basic annotation as close to the top as i can that'll give us a version number that'll help us moving forward over the coming months and years if i update these maybe there's a new feature that comes out and there's another instruction i'd like to include i'll come out with new versions over time the first container is initial setup readme this will always contain the basic instructions that you need to run through one time to customize this sequence for your local system the next container is sequence usage readme this contains the instructions about how you use this sequence moving forward once you're experienced you probably won't need this next we have our equipment check container and this container's purpose is just to make sure that everything is ready for imaging so making sure that our camera is cooled and our mount isn't parked are two examples next we have our target start conditions and by default all of these sequences are set to start at nautical dusk or at this target's horizon the next container is prepare target this is where we plate solve to make sure we're pointing at the appropriate target and performing in auto focus the next container is lrgb imaging and this is where we'll perform our imaging loops for this particular target so let's go ahead and open up the initial setup readme you'll see i have step-by-step instructions including some guidance on what you should be configuring from a default perspective before you re-save this customized for your own system step one is to properly configure center after drift i see a lot of people getting this wrong because they're not really thinking through the tolerances that are already configured on your system so the first guidance i have here tells you that evaluate after exposures should remain at one exposure there's really no reason to set this any higher today if you're not familiar with center after drift watch this other video that i'll also link in the comments but basically what will happen is a background plate solve will occur in this case after every single image is taken while the background plate solve is happening we are moving on to the next exposure if another exposure completes before the previous background plate solve is completed don't worry another background plate solve will not be kicked off the system is intelligent enough to make sure that doesn't happen the next parameter is to configure the maximum number of arc minutes you'll allow the system to drift before re-centering will be required this is where i see most of the mistakes being made if you look at my guidance here the first thing i need you to look at within neenah is your current configuration of your pointing tolerance of your plate solver to do that we're going to go to options plate solving then we're going to look at pointing tolerance you can see that i'm configured as one argumented here let's think about what that means for a second on this system whenever a plate solve occurs it's going to try to get as close as it can to the expected ra and dec coordinates of the target my system here is configured to be okay with being off by as much as one arc minute that means that if my plate solve comes back and my mount points at the target but happens to be off by whatever one arc minute happens to be it'll happily move forward onto the next instruction so let's go back to our sequence and put one arc minute into our maximum parameter here now notice when you hit tab or navigate away from the field after entering the arcminutes that the number of pixels is calculated this is based on the imaging camera and focal length you have defined within neenah here i can see that one arc minute equals 98 pixels setting this any lower doesn't make any sense at all because my actual plate solve could be outside my drift tolerance okay but we're not done yet the next thing i want you to do is add 20 pixels to this pixel total well if you've configured dithering according to best practices your system should be dithering about 10 imaging camera pixels with each dither now this is actually a maximum based on how phd2 randomizes this information each dither is actually a random pixel count up to that number and in a random direction so i'm adding 20 here because what i'm doing is i'm saying even if i had a worst case plate solve that was off by a full arc minute and my first two dithers were also worst case scenarios in the same direction and at the same maximum amount only at that point would i center after drift what i'm doing here is building in a healthy tolerance with some realistic parameters now there's a number of reasons your system could drift like bad polar alignment or even somebody bumping the mount what we're trying to do is build in realistic tolerances so that we maintain our centering but don't re-trigger this needlessly so 98 plus 20 in my case is 118. so i'm going to try to configure my max arc minute setting so that i end up with 118 pixels that are calculated let's try maybe 1.3 that calculates too high so let's go down a little bit and try 1.1 that's too low let's try 1.2 and there we go 118 pixels exactly what i was hoping for now let's remember 1.2 as the arc minutes that i'm going to need throughout the rest of my sequences i won't need to calculate this again the next configuration change we want to set defaults for is our cool camera temperature and equipment check so we'll go ahead and open equipment check and set our temperature here i'm going to set mine to negative 5 celsius as a default because that's typically what i image at with this particular camera after that the initial setup guide tells me to open up lrgb imaging and make a couple other changes specifically let's go in and set our filters by name our exposure lengths and our exposure counts most of us may have similar but could have very different filter naming conventions so you need to configure this manually and then save it now i'm going to go through for my lrgb and just set l r g and then b some of you may recall i took a survey not that long ago through youtube and i found that the typical response for lrgb imaging was 120 seconds so i've set that here as the default i'm going to go ahead and leave that for myself as well as far as the number of exposures for each i'm going to leave those to 10 so i'm basically going to do 10l then 10r then 10g then 10b and then loop around you can configure this any way you like based on your typical sequences the instructions also told us not to modify the dither parameter on each smart exposure line that's because we're going to actually set a trigger to do that for us you can see that the default looping conditions here ought to loop this target until nautical dawn or until the target hits the horizon line these are perfect for defaults if you want different defaults you can change them but i find leaving these as defaults works great and then i can modify them later as needed per target the next thing it wants me to look at here are the triggers now we need to auto focus after every filter change in this particular sequence so we can leave that alone if you feel like you need to change your autofocus after hfr increases you can set that any way you like based on your equipment i've said a default amount of hfr change here is 10 however you may find that 5 may work even better but again this is equipment specific and depends on your own setup and seeing conditions then we also have dither after exposures by default i've set it to 10. now for me personally i found one of the things that have made the biggest impact to my imaging over time is dithering more frequently i'm gonna go ahead in this case and change it to five so that i dither every five frames okay we should have everything set up here now so let's go back to our initial setup guide and we can see the last thing it wants us to do is open up prepare target and set the initial filter that will be used for our first autofocus and for our initial plate saw via the slew and center command i'm going to do that with my luminance filter because i know that's going to work great with my plate solving and that's also the first filter that i'm going to use in imaging so i might as well go ahead and run that autofocus here as well before i'm ready to take my first image for the evening now we can go back to the initial setup guide and we see our final step is actually to delete the initial setup guide we're not going to need this again so we'll go ahead on that particular container go over and click the trash can make sure you're clicking the right trash can here we only want to delete the initial setup readme once that's done we go all the way to the top to mono lrgb and we're going to go ahead and click the save icon and then click ok to overwrite what we already had in place what we're doing here is saving the defaults we just configured so that they'll be there the next time we want to use this sequence now at this point let's go ahead and delete the entire sequence now that it's saved to do that i'm going to use the trashcan icon all the way at the top of the advanced sequencer to validate that our defaults were saved properly let's go ahead and just drag this mono lrgb sequence back over and double check our parameters we can see that center after drift retains the 1.2 arc minute setting and we'll also see that our camera temperature our filters our exposures our dithers everything should be in place once we validated it we can go all the way to the top and click the trash can again now just as a quick test for some of you that may be new to this i'm going to go to the sky atlas and i'm going to search for an object here we see all of the sequences that are ready we could select mono lrgb here or we can go to framing once framing loads and i've configured the framing the way i want it i can go ahead and say add target to sequence use the sequencer and then say mono lrgb that'll move this particular target into the mono lrgb sequence we just configured in the advanced sequencer now we see parameters and our target is here and we also see all of our defaults were pulled in as expected let's go ahead and use the trashcan icon to delete this again now before we move on to configuring our next sequence i do want to show you what it looks like when you're missing a piece of equipment and to do that i'm going to go up here to equipment and i'm going to disconnect my guider now with the guider disconnected if i go back into sequencer and my advanced sequences and then drag mono lrgb over it's very easy to see the particular instructions that have a problem with that particular equipment missing here i see restore guiding and i can go ahead and delete that command if i knew i never had a guider i can go through all of the other containers and look for that warning symbol start guiding is unnecessary i can delete that dither after exposures is unnecessary because dithering is done by the guider and then stop guiding as well once i've removed all of these i could go save this now i'm not going to do that for myself because i do have a guider but if you didn't have a guide or were missing another piece of hardware this is how you would modify the sequences for your own system now let me go reconnect my guider so we don't get those warnings moving forward the next one i want to show you is how to configure mono lrgb offsets you'll notice it's the same structure it's just a little bit different because we don't have to auto focus between every filter change because we're using filter offsets you'll also notice that the initial setup readme is very similar as well there's a number of things we have to do here so the first thing we need to do is center after drift well we don't need to do the calculation because we already know the answer is 1.2 arc minutes for this system we also know i'm going to cool my camera to negative 5 and i'm going to move on to lrgb imaging and in this case it tells me to leave the dither alone and set my filters counts and exposure lengths one thing we would like to do different here though is that with filter offsets we'd like to have our filters in a specific order what we want to do is keep our filters in an order so that the focuser moves in a consistent direction so what we're going to do on a system with filter offsets configured is we'll go to options and then autofocus you can see i have used filter offsets enabled i have my focus filter settings configured here at the bottom and you can see i also have backlash compensation defined as well so to make sure the backlash compensation doesn't kick in all the time between filters what i'm going to do is keep my focuser moving in a consistent direction here this is an lrgb sequence so i'm only going to look at the lrgb lines now look at the focus offset line for each i want to start with the highest number and move towards the smallest number here blue is at 41 then green is at 11 then luminance is at zero and red is at negative 12. so if you think about the number line from biggest to smallest i'm going from b g l then r so let's go back and set our sequence to run b g l then r so you'll notice at the bottom of all four smart exposure instructions is where i have a separate dither instruction you can watch my offset video about this but basically what i'm doing is i'm going to run through some number of b and then g and then l and then r and then i'll dither then i'll go back through bglr and then dither again now to remain consistent earlier i made sure that i dithered every 520 second frames so i'm gonna configure that here as well so i'll do five blue five green five luminance five red and then dither i can also change my default looping conditions but here these are fine and i can also change my autofocus after hfr increases if that's needed next it wants us to go to prepare target and set the filter if you remember from the last sequence i wanted to make sure i plate solved with my luminance filter and also my first autofocus was with luminance because it's quicker and i've got plenty of stars to look at now as far as the autofocus that happens slightly after that the luminance filter may or may not be used that may depend on your offset configuration just like before the last thing we need to do here is delete the initial setup readme and then save this sequence and all of its defaults and then we can close it the next one we want to look at is mono lrgb offsets rotate you're going to configure this exactly like the last sequence with all of the same parameters in place so i'm going to go through this very quickly the only difference between this sequence and the previous sequence is here in prepare target we're doing a slew center and rotate instead of just a slow and center so once we've got this set up exactly like we need it we can just go ahead and delete the initial setup guide and then save this sequence as well the next sequence we'll look at is the final lrgb sequence which is mono lrgb rotate now this is identical to mono lrgb with the only difference being slew center and rotate instead of slow and center so i can quickly run through this configuration as well and put all the necessary defaults in place and then save it okay that was all of our mono lrgb sequences our mono sho sequences really aren't any different the only difference being we're using different filters because we're imaging narrowband instead of broadband so basically we'll just have to run through these as well just like we did lrgb so with sho there's not a lot of difference in comparison to configuring lrgb one of the differences is that i'm going to have longer exposure times now by default i've set this to 300 seconds based on my previous survey via youtube for me lately i've been shooting at 180 seconds which i find actually is working out better for me because i'm going to do 180 seconds i'm gonna double my exposure counts per filter from four to eight again configure this the way you want it configured for your system with longer exposures i also typically dither every exposure so with five minutes i would dither every one exposure as a trigger with three minutes though i might go every two exposures again at this point it's just about setting up the defaults and saving them to our system we do have to remember that when it comes to offsets with show just like with lrgb we want to get our filters in the appropriate order from highest relative offset to lowest to keep those auto focus or teeth engaged throughout the entire loop so here when i look at my offsets for show on my particular system i'm going to order my filters as o h and then s because my largest number is negative 87 for o3 h a is negative 102 and then negative 212 for s2 biggest number to smallest number by default for narrowband i've set five minute exposures based on my previous survey lately i found three minutes is better for my particular system so i'm going to change this to 180 seconds per exposure and because i'm going from 5 minutes to 3 minutes i'm gonna set this to two of each exposure that way i have two of these occur per filter before that dither kicks in at the end of the loop so now just finish out the rest of the parameters as necessary for the rest of your narrow band sequences next we can look at one shot color notice i only have one shot color and one shot color rotate because my assumption with one shot color here is that you're not using filters if you do plan on using filters just go ahead and reuse one of the mono sequences and that'll work fine for you now quick word of caution when you get to one shot color your one shot color camera is probably in a different profile it's potentially at a different focal length and it's definitely a different camera and may have a different pixel size so you may have to go through and do the math again for your center after drift for the one shot color sequences as it may be different than your mono sequences just use the same methodology that i mentioned in the initial setup guide or that i showed you when we first looked at mono lrgb now these sequences are a little bit easier to set up because we don't have to deal with filters go set the parameters that you need for these just like you did the other sequences remember that this is a different camera and you may have a different cooling point you'll also notice without filters the imaging sequence is much easier as well there's only a single take exposure line that we loop repeatedly i'll leave the default at 120 seconds but just sticking with my previous methodology i'll go ahead and change the trigger to dither every five exposures of course save this and then do the same type of thing for one shot color rotate that only differs by that one rotation instruction okay we've finished all of our target imaging sequences the next thing i want to show you is our start and end sequences specifically let's look first at basic sequence end you can see here all i'm really doing is warming the camera and parking the scope at the end of the evening i don't need to make any changes here so i don't need to edit it or resave it now we have basic sequence start this one's a little bit more complex because it sets up our evening the goal with this sequence is to make sure that our system is ready to start imaging targets the two containers within the basic sequence start is an equipment check that you're familiar with already and then a safe autofocus and sync container notice that because this is at the beginning of the evening i'm actually allowing this to start 10 minutes before nautical dusk so that i can actually make sure my scope is unparked and my camera gets cooled by the time i'm ready to image which by default is nautical dusk set the cooling temperature to whatever you want it to be the next container i have is safe autofocus and sync now this may be something you want to employ or not my goal with this container at the beginning of the evening after my mount is unparked and my camera is cooled is set a filter and then slew to an unobstructed portion of the sky or a safe portion of the sky for me i've set that to an altitude of 70 degrees and an azimuth of 90 degrees that's due east if you're not aware with azimuth at 0 degrees is north 90 degrees is east 180 is south and 270 is west why am i going east because i'm right around nautical dusk and i want to point away from sunset then i'm going to kick off my knight's first autofocus once that's done i'm going to call a solve and sync command what this does is takes a picture wherever the mount is currently pointed and performs a plate solve based on the plate solved coordinates it syncs that data to the mount it doesn't force a re-slew or anything like that all it's doing is telling the mount where it's really pointing right now my goal here is to make sure that before i try to slew to any further targets my mount has a good idea of where i'm currently pointing if you want to use this sequence just define the filter and the alt as parameters and make sure you save the sequence if you don't want to use this portion of the sequence just delete this container when you're done make sure you save this if you've made modifications okay now let's talk about startup sequences to open a startup sequence you're going to use the icons at the bottom of the screen you're going to click the folder icon you're going to go inside templates and then inside the new startup sequence templates folder you'll see there's three of them here go ahead and click on basic startup pa and click open now notice what a startup sequence template is it's a complete saved sequence in this case it doesn't really have much going on but i'm going to talk you through how to configure this because we just went through and configured our basic sequence end and basic sequence start we can go ahead and leverage those by dragging them into place here notice the annotations at the top and bottom of the page here tell you exactly where to drag those sequences so go ahead and drag your basic sequence start to the top and your basic sequence end to the bottom you should have already modified this so there's really nothing else to do now once you've modified this for your system we're going to go ahead and save this using the save icon at the bottom of the page it'll re-save it over the top of the previous file and then we can go ahead and remove it from the active sequence now there are two ways to use startup sequences the first is to manually load them like we just did the other way to use them is to tell nina to automatically apply that startup sequence every time you open nina so what we're going to do is we're going to go to options and then imaging and then over on the right in the sequence section you can see there's a line that says startup sequence template we can go ahead and add the basic startup pa sequence template here you may also find that the collapse sequence templates by default is pretty handy as well so that you don't have everything open fully expanded now to show you how all this works i'm going to go ahead and close out of nina pay no attention to the equipment warnings we're just going to close out and then restart nina once nina reopens go to sequencer advanced sequencer and then notice that our startup template is in place this means that our beginning and end of evening configuration is already done for us all we need to do is add targets and start imaging so what does this look like in practice well let's go search for m101 and we'll go ahead and add that to framing and then once we've got it framed the way we want it framed we can go ahead and add that to a sequence since we've modified rotation we'll go ahead and use one of the rotation sequences here i'll use mono lrgb rotate that'll move this target into the sequence exactly where we expected it into the main sequencing area so now because we have a startup template configured in nina and we've selected a target we've got a complete sequence okay what if we want to add a second target to the evening well that's easy we just go to the sky atlas and find another target and just add it using one of our sequences by default nina adds targets in the order you add them to the sequencer so notice we're going to start with m101 and then move on to m51 so again we've got a basic sequence start that'll run and then m101 and then m51 and then we'll eventually end the evening now if you've used any imaging software before you know you need to tell the system when to move off of m101 onto our second target to do that we have to tell the first target when it needs to end and we do that via the imaging container looping conditions if you remember by default our looping conditions always said to loop until the object went below its horizon or until nautical dawn well if we wait until nautical dawn we'll never get to image m51 so we need to modify that there are a lot of looping options you can use including explicit times so i'll go ahead and just modify that one here to set a specific time of 2 am at which point we'll move on to m51 now i shouldn't have to do anything to m51 because that one's already set to end by default in nautical dawn which is fine now let me show you the next startup sequence that i've included and that one is called looped startup pa now the initial configuration for this is the same i need to drag my basic sequence start and basic sequence end over but you'll notice one major difference here is that i have a new container in the middle that's called a looped targets container the looped targets container is just an outer loop that's going to loop your targets until nautical dawn over and over and over once you've put basic sequence start and basic sequence end you can go ahead and save this so you don't have to modify it again in the future from a usage perspective you can open this at any time and then just drag targets into this looped container so what i'm gonna do here is create a simple two panel mosaic of the elephant trunk nebula instead of adding these to a sequence directly i'm going to save these panels to a target list because with mosaics you may find you may need to image over multiple nights and this will be a little bit easier for me to go find my framing from the previous night since i've saved them as targets when i come back into the advanced sequencer i'll go ahead and click targets you can see my panels are here i can just drag those panels into the looped targets container one after another now this is instructing the system to loop these two panels over and over and over until nautical dawn but remember each of these target containers have looping conditions of their own and we need to modify those or we may never exit from panel one to panel two so in this case i'm going to use loop for iterations and change it to five what this basically means is that for this particular target i'm going to run through this loop five times as long as this target remains above the horizon then i'll exit the loop and move on to my second panel i'll go ahead and set that one to iterations 5 as well as a looping condition and when that one completes the outer loop that says to loop both targets until nautical dawn will tell me to go back to panel one i'll do that five times and then move on to two and so forth now i don't see a lot of people doing a full mosaic in an evening but this startup sequence is here in case you'd like to use it the final startup sequence i have for you is the one that's heavily based on jerry macon's fantastic shared sequence that uses the ascom safety monitor and dome hardware now i'm not going to be able to go through this here it needs a video of its own but feel free to dig into it if you'd like to look at it and feel free to ask questions as well so let's just look at the last couple sequences that are in the extras folder the first one is bias in dark frames this is a pretty simple sequence that's just going to help you take a bias and dark frame library for a new camera just go through the readme and setup guide there at the top and it'll help you set it up and use it the next extra sequence i'll show you here is the time-lapse imaging sequence this is just a fun extra sequence you may choose to use if you want to do time lapse style imaging you can read through it and understand it but there is some configuration information included there as well and then the final extra i included is my exoplanet transit sequence it's just a little bit more in depth and uses the exoplanet transit information for timing you can watch the exoplanet video to learn a little bit more on how imaging these targets is a little different than your typical galaxy or nebula if you're watching this video here right now congratulations you've made it to the end if you have any questions on my advanced sequences or just want to comment feel free to do that in the comments below reach out to me on instagram or through my website at www.patriotastro.com hopefully these templates will help you they'll get you started or they'll push you a little bit further down the path with the advanced sequencer now go ahead and get them installed configured and start imaging and as always clear skies [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Patriot Astro

Views: 6,209

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Id: Gcekn0lw2IY

Length: 40min 6sec (2406 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021