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Old 23-09-2023, 09:31 PM
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The_bluester (Paul)
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Kilmore, Australia
Posts: 3,344
I am not 100% sure what you mean by planning an individual run.

In terms of splitting time between NB and broadband I let the moon constraints do the work. I generally try to shoot quite a bit of LRGB on targets, so for instance I set a "Moon up" constraint on my narrowband sets, so if the moon is down, it will shoot LRGB exclusively (Which I have often set up with a "Moon down" constraint though I am now playing with the moon Lorentzian constraints, which set a moon distance based on the phase, and have three sets, so I use an LRGB, a narrowband and a seperate Oiii onbe that falls between the other two given Oiii tends to be more sensitive to the moon that HA or Sii.

That way for instance if you are under a first quarter moon, it will shoot narrowband until the moon sets then change to LRGB. And under a three quarter moon the opposite happens, it shoots LRGB until moonrise then changes to narrowband, and you do not need to mess around night by night working out what time to shoot NB versus LRGB, the moon constraints do it for you.

I tend to throw multiple targets at it (With the slight pain of planning targets to suit a single camera angle as I don't have a rotator) with the targets planned to pass through the meridian a few hours apart. With hour angle constraints to shoot maybe two hours either side of the meridian per target, if you are setting up and tearing down each night you might widen that window to get as much data as you can on a target per night but I try to stay not more than + - 3 hours. Mid winter I have had it shoot data on three targets in a night.

In my experience Voyager nails focus time after time, better than anything else I have used, and it does it quickly. A single star focus (Robostar in Voyager terms) takes about the same time as full frame focus (Localfield) even including the slews, and NB focus via Robostar takes about the same amount of time as LRGB does as it slews to brighter stars so the exposure time is about the same.

And then there is the error detection and actions. I help a friend with a bit of a temperamental camera, the driver or firmware occasionally mess up and with every other software package he had used it would be the end of his night unless he was up and saw it. It required the cam to be power cycled and USB connection cycled to revive it. I helped with a dragscript (Which is a drag and drop method of setting Voyager up to work as you want it) so that on the camera throwing an expose error it will stop the mount, close PHD2 (Which sometimes didn't behave itself afterwards) then via "Viking" (Another bit of software by the same developer, to control interface equipment) disconnect the setup, power and USB cycle the camera via his Powerbox Ultimate, reconnect the setup (Which will re-launch PHD2) cool the cam and keep on going, emailing us when it does so. I have seen it revive the camera three or four times in a night before. You still loose time to it (Cooling the cam particularly) but not nearly so much as the cam lockig up just after you go to bed.

I can't compare Voyager to NINA as I went to Voyager when NINA was in it's infancy and at that time it was not able to do what I wanted but notwithstanding that Voyager is a subscription model I can't see any reason I would change, for me it just works too well at integrating everything. For those that want to there is also a version that can control an array, so you can have up to four scopes on a single mount, shooting different cub lengths and it will coordinate the exposures, focus runs etc, and make sure you don't do something like have it dither the mount while one of the cams is still exposing.
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