Focusing

[Gavin1234]

Hi, thanks to some advice and feedback I’ve got from you guys I’ve ordered an auto focusing kit. It’s going to take about 6 weeks to arrive though.

In the meantime I want to,work on improving my focus manually. At the moment I use SGP frame and focus which shows the HFR for stars in my frame. I’m using binning at 4x4 and I can get the number down to 0.79 at best. The number is different if I use different binning settings.

Should I be using binning 4x4 or 1x1? Or does that make no difference? I don’t have a batanov mask just yet. Other than getting one of those are there any other tips I can get for improving my focus?

[multiweb (Marc)]

I reckon you're making things hard for yourself. Get a Bahtinov mask and that will sort your immediate focusing issues then automate down the road if you want to keep your scope in focus for a long period of time.

[Imme (Jon)]

Originally Posted by multiweb

I reckon you're making things hard for yourself. Get a Bahtinov mask and that will sort your immediate focusing issues then automate down the road if you want to keep your scope in focus for a long period of time.

+1 for the bahtinov.

I have autofocus set up on my scope.....but feel I get better focus manually focusing every 2-3 hours with the bahtinov.
It's a close race, but I think bahtinov is better as it relies on your 'eye' rather than a computer counting pixels and computing them in to a figure.