Design Goals - ac4lt/autonomous-nina-sequence GitHub Wiki

With the Target Scheduler plugin, NINA users have a new way of dealing with image acquisition. Instead of a sequence driven approach where each target gets its own sequence or the sequence changes every night as targets come and go, we now have a pattern where the user simply enters the targets of interest and Target Scheduler will get to them as it can. The sequence needn't change from night to night. This reduces complexity for the end user and also reduces the chance to make mistakes eating the sequence.

However, Target Scheduler currently only deals with light frame acquisition. It doesn't provide any support for dark and bias calibration frames. This sequence aims to close that gap and also to provide a sequence that requires minimal user intervention when run in an observatory.

Goals:

  1. Make every possible effort to ensure that the telescope is not tracking when it isn't imaging.
  2. If desired, run the sequence 24/7 without user intervention so long as unfinished targets exist in the Target Scheduler database.
  3. Get bias and dark frames upon user request without interrupting the running sequence.
  4. Keep track of the number of required calibration frames acquired even if this takes multiple days to complete.
  5. Provide hooks at specific points for customization specific to the equipment in use at any given location.
  6. Modular construction

Not Goals:

  1. Efficiency: Target Scheduler is not trying to optimize how targets are acquired in any particular way so neither is this sequence.
  2. Sky Flats: The sequence does not support sky flats but may in the future.
  3. Multiple exposures per binning: Currently the sequence assumes a single bin1 broadband exposure setting, a single bin2 broadband exposure setting and a single narrowband bin1 exposure setting. While these settings only apply to darks (Target Scheduler handles the actual light frame acquisition) it may limit some usages for automatic darks. I'm thinking about clean ways to support more values if a use case can be argued.