SUMMARY *** The ekos autofocus routine sometimes struggles: it may include points far enough from critical focus that the HFR calculation goes wrong and throws off the best fit curve,. Also atmospheric conditions like wisps of cloud can sometimes interfere with the success of the routine. Often in cases where the algorithm struggles it's perfectly obvious after the first pass to a human operator where the true minimum of the focal curve is, or you know that it was perfectly well focused for the last sub but it's just doing a time-based focus check and getting confused. It would be fantastic if the ekos autofocus tab had a simple means of selecting the critical focus step, either by clicking on the curve or by entering the step number in a text entry box, and a button to override the algorithm, in effect to say "I'm giving you the true focal position, go to that position immediately and mark the autofocus job as complete". On marking focus as complete in this way a scheduled job would then move on to its next step. ***
So autofocus then is never engaged and you are only focused to a specific step location? Maybe autofocus should not be part of the scheduler steps?
Autofocus usually works for me, but sometimes it just hunts forever, mostly if I start a little off the true position and the initial step goes far enough away from critical focus that the hfr detector seems to fail and reports a wrong hfr of 1.0; as it moves in toward the correct position the curve begins to form but the best fit is thrown off by the first one or two erroneous results. Also sometimes it feels like it can get thrown off for no reason - maybe thin cloud or wind shake, I don't know. If it does this overnight then tough luck I guess, but it would be nice to have a manual override so that if I happen to still be awake (say at the start of a job) I could intervene more easily if autofocus fails. Just an option for those times when the human knows better than the computer.