Cant get NINA/Hocus Focus to show annotations when running autofocus

[blinky]

See the screenshot, I think I've enabled everything but Hocus Focus is not annotating the starts with the HFR data, what have I done wrong?

[scotty38]

Is the screenshot above from the plugin page? I think you can change those settings in the docked app on the Imaging Tab too but no idea if that makes any difference or overrides anything.

[Lumos]

Can I just confirm, that you are calling the Nina autofocus routine, not from the Hocus Focus plugin. If you have the plugin then NINA will use it whenever you try and autofocus. 

[scotty38]

On 17/03/2023 at 15:48, Lumos said:

Can I just confirm, that you are calling the Nina autofocus routine, not from the Hocus Focus plugin. If you have the plugin then NINA will use it whenever you try and autofocus. 

NINA should focus with whatever you have selected here:

or indeed as here:

[Lumos]

Good point, when I installed Hocus Focus it changed the defaults for me to use Hocus Focus, but it may not always so you should definitely check those options.

[StuartT]

On 14/03/2023 at 22:33, blinky said:

See the screenshot, I think I've enabled everything but Hocus Focus is not annotating the starts with the HFR data, what have I done wrong?

I have the same problem. I used HF for the first time last night and it didn't annotate my stars in the image window either.

(It also gave me very weird focus curves, so I have switched back to using NINA for autofocus)

[Stuart1971]

On 14/03/2023 at 22:33, blinky said:

See the screenshot, I think I've enabled everything but Hocus Focus is not annotating the starts with the HFR data, what have I done wrong?

Click the button top right of screen to show annotations…

Edited April 16, 2023 by Stuart1971

[Martin Farmer]

As I understand it it won't annotate the stars whilst it is performing the autofocus routine. If you watched the excellent Patriot video it's a bit misleading in the fact that Chad has annotation on his stars within running the autofocus routine - What I think he has done it to edit in the saved images from a Hocus Focus run. This is something you can do and is very useful to go back and review the saved information whilst not at the telescope.

You will only see the effects of the autofocus on HFR within this data - just enable the save and the save path, but be aware it generates quite some data..

[Stuart1971]

16 minutes ago, Martin Farmer said:

As I understand it it won't annotate the stars whilst it is performing the autofocus routine. If you watched the excellent Patriot video it's a bit misleading in the fact that Chad has annotation on his stars within running the autofocus routine - What I think he has done it to edit in the saved images from a Hocus Focus run. This is something you can do and is very useful to go back and review the saved information whilst not at the telescope.

You will only see the effects of the autofocus on HFR within this data - just enable the save and the save path, but be aware it generates quite some data..

You can see (or certainly used to be able to) the stars during the routine as long as you are using the full screen, but many people use a region of interest for auto focus and this does then not show the stars…but in saying that it’s changes a lot recently with many updates so it could have changed….it’s been a while since I have used…

[StuartT]

1 hour ago, Martin Farmer said:

As I understand it it won't annotate the stars whilst it is performing the autofocus routine. If you watched the excellent Patriot video it's a bit misleading in the fact that Chad has annotation on his stars within running the autofocus routine - What I think he has done it to edit in the saved images from a Hocus Focus run. This is something you can do and is very useful to go back and review the saved information whilst not at the telescope.

You will only see the effects of the autofocus on HFR within this data - just enable the save and the save path, but be aware it generates quite some data..

ah.. this explains it. I was confused by Chad's video too as he appeared to show annotations during a live run. But obviously not. 

In any case, I can't get HF to work, so I am going back to plain old NINA AF

[Martin Farmer]

Give it another try but set the plugin to save the focusing run to disk - you are able to then go and review what it has done. It produces one full frame image of best focus and numerous PNG that are annotated with the values of HFR, you can then make reference to the points in the curve that are causing you issues and see what values it calculated or if it failed then you can see why (I assume it was unable to calculate any values).

When I went over from the internal focus routine within Nina I had to reduce the step size slightly with the HF plugin.

Stick with it and perhaps post on here your findings StuartT.