NINA Lucky Imaging Plug-in

Tony Gondola:
Does anyone have any experience with the Lucky Imaging plug-in for NINA? I have what I think is a reasonable sequence but would love any additional pointers. Here's the main seq. loop:



Ignore the wait for time at the bottom. Basically what I think I'm telling the system to do is:

Plate solve to target
Take 60 ser video frames of 2 sec. each
Check trigger conditions
Continue until 3 am

I'm not sure if it will consider each video frame as an exposure or the entire take video command as one exposure.

Will 2sec swamp your read noise? Maybe if bortle 9?

Noah Tingey:
I have not used the plugin but if you have Discord, I've found the people on the Discord to be super helpful. https://discord.gg/rWRbVbw

I can't get in, apparently I have an old invitation that's expired.

Noah Tingey:

Tony Gondola:

Noah Tingey:
I have not used the plugin but if you have Discord, I've found the people on the Discord to be super helpful. https://discord.gg/rWRbVbw

I can't get in, apparently I have an old invitation that's expired.

Try this: https://discord.gg/nighttime-imaging

Got it, thank you!

I got a chance to talk with Nick Holland, the result of that is a new sequence that I'll experiment with this evening. Here it is if anyone is interested:



This is between the usual beginning and end sequences. In this case the slew and center command is taking the place of the usual center after drift although I suspect that the number of frames captured while taking video should be a lot higher for that approach to be efficient. I'm not using the ROI option yet as I'm just testing for basic functionality and see how more effective it is compared to a standard sequence. If it works well it will allow me to stay within NINA for this kind of work which to me, is a plus.

Médéric Hébert:
Good to know that we can automate planetary imaging in Nina with this plugin and Orbitals. Will make it a lot easier once they're back up in the sky

For that you would want to use the "calculate roi position" instruction. It should work well. I used it for without roi on M92 last night and it worked as advertised.

I know, but we can automate slewing and autofocus without having to switch software for capture

Why so negative andrea? I have my own reservations about using the Lucky Imaging plug-in that way but I'm not convinced that it's not possible, at least in a limited way.
Have you tried to do this yourself? If you have then I'm sure you'd have some constructive input on the questions.

I'm using and exploring the techniques for deep sky, Médéric Hébert was talking about automated planetary imaging which I do think presents more difficulty.

Actually, the Lucky container only saves the images as standard fits files. According to Nick, he's planning on adding the ability to save the data as a ser file sometime in the future. The advantage I would see is having one file rather than several thousand making it easier to process in Siril or other programs like Astrosurface. That said, I'm perfectly happy with fits so I'm not sure it would help me at all. The plug-in does have the ability to specify ROI so that's already implemented. The main thing I'm looking for is better efficiency when working in the realm of very short exposures of just a few seconds. I tested it last night with 2 sec subs on M92 and it worked well giving me an efficiency of about 82% as compared to using a standard NINA sequence which gives me closer to 50%. I haven't tried just turning off all of the processing in NINA yet, I might get the same gains as using the plug-in, we'll see.