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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
    Location
    Kamuela, HI
    Posts
    78

    Default How to parse/control FocusMax logs

    Hi,

    I'm sure this is covered somewhere, but I've had no luck finding it. How can I customize the location for the FocusMax logs to be written? On my system, they're going to My Documents/ACP Astronomy/Logs/AutoFocus/. I'd like to send them to a custom folder location (I've already done this for the run logs and images).

    Also, the logs are very short, they don't include the feed of info from Focus Max itself, just the basic info from ACP. I've checked FocusMax and the "Send Log Text to ACP" option is checked. Is there some other step I'm missing to get the FocusMax log text?

    thanks,
    Josh

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Location
    Mesa, AZ
    Posts
    33,721

    Default

    Josh -

    Scheduler considers periodic autofocus to be a separate operation that is performed between Observations (which are ACP imaging runs). Therefore you won't see periodic autofocus info in ACP runs. The place where the logs for those AF runs go is in the ACP local user's default logging directory and the logs are named Autofocus-dd-mmm-yyyy@hhmmss.log If you force an autofocus as part of an Observation then it is done within the Observation just before acquiring the images. In that case the FocusMax logging info should be in the ACP run log and not in a separate log. Are we on the same page? If you want I can call to clarify.
    -- Bob

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
    Location
    Kamuela, HI
    Posts
    78

    Default

    Hi Bob,

    Thanks for the clarification. I'm hoping someone out there can advise me on the best way to proceed. Here's my problem (which is really a FocusMax issue, not ACP):

    I'm writing code that looks at all of our images from the night (currently it does it the following day, but once perfected, it will run alongside data collection). I keep track of the FWHM of the images, so we can see how well we are staying in focus. I'd like to mark in my logs and plots when a FocusMax run happens and parse out the results (position, temperature, best HFD, etc.).

    I'm running in to a problem that the FocusMax logs are difficult to parse. The reason is that when FM starts, it creates a log file named with the current date and time (local time). It then populates that logs until FM is closed. The issue is that each line has the local time, but no date indicator. When FM runs for several days at a time, this means that it becomes difficult to disentangle which day a particular focus run occurred. In principle, I can do some counting to keep track, but that becomes more difficult if a night of observations is missed due to weather. I'm hoping there is a simple way to parse these logs. Has anyone else run in to this and found an elegant solution?

    My tentative idea is to use the Windows 7 "Task Scheduler" and schedule it to start FocusMax each afternoon. There is an option to "Stop task if it runs longer than ...". If I set that to 1 day, then I'm hoping FocusMax will stop and a new instance will be started, thereby ending the previous night's log and creating a new log for this night. I haven't tested this yet (ask me in a few days), but it seems like a kludge to me and I'm hoping there is a better way.

    cheers,
    Josh

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Location
    Mesa, AZ
    Posts
    33,721

    Default

    Should I move this to the FocusMax section here?
    -- Bob

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
    Location
    Kamuela, HI
    Posts
    78

    Default

    Hi Bob, yeah, that's probably a good idea with the new question.

    -Josh

 

 

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