Possible bug with exposure timeout in Focus window

[John Evans]

Hi Patrick,

Good spot! I think your suggestion to deal with the timeout in the same way as capture is a good idea.

Feel free to change it. If you like you can add me as a reviewer on the MR.

It would probably be worth making the default timeout in Focus the same as Capture (assuming it’s a sensible default - I haven’t checked). (This is the part of the timeout excluding the exposure).

Regards,
John.

On 16 Jan 2024, at 18:32, Patrick Molenaar <pr_molenaar at hotmail.com> wrote:


Hi,

Last week there was a clear sky and I had some time to put my gear out after months of rain. After setting up my gear I tried to take an exposure for determining the focus. At first the exposure was successful, but it was only about 10 seconds. I had an L-Extreme filter on my Canon camera and no stars were visible. So I tried a longer exposure, about 30 seconds, this time I got an "Exposure failure, Restarting exposure" error message. 
Each time I tried the exposure was aborted after about 23 seconds. Only exposures shorter than 20 seconds were successful. In the end I gave up for that night as I was unable to focus my camera.

The days after that I connected my camera, tried different cables, different camera settings, but every time when the expose was longer then about 23 seconds, it was cancelled before it was finished.

Eventually I started looking in the sourcecode of KStars and found where the exposure was cancelled. I found out that in the options of the focus window, there is an exposure-timeout setting, which was by default set to 30 seconds. When I increased this setting to a higher value, I was able to make longer exposures, but when the exposure time was greater then the exposure timeout setting, the exposure was aborted again.

In other locations in the sourcecode of KStars I found that the exposure timeout was added to the exposure time, so the timeout only occurs a given number of seconds after the exposure should have finished. For the exposure timeout in the focus dialog this was not the case.

Is this a bug in the software?
Or was it intended to have a fixed timeout for the focus windows, that aborts the exposure when the exposure time is set to a value longer then the exposure timeout.

If it is a bug, I am aslo willing to make a fix for it; please let me know. As my profession is software designer and I have made a contribution to KStars in the past (Bahtinov Focus Assistant), this shouldn't be that diffucult.

Kind regards,

Patrick Molenaar
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