We appear to have lost the ability to step the EAF by Fine and Coarse steps with arrow keys in the v2.0.0 Beta (Build 30, firmware 10.08), even though the Fine and Coarse step fields are still there in the EAF setting window. Go figure -- there is no UI I can find that uses those fields anymore.

The only focuser icon in the main ASIAIR window leads directly to the autofocus window.

The only way to manually focus is to type in the EAF steps and tap GoTo.

Crosshair, annotation and star size tools are a direct tap now, instead of going through a parent menu.

There must have been so many complains of tracking stopping by itself that there is now a tracking indicator on the main window. There is a bug, though -- I am connected to the same ASIAIR from two different iPads, and one of them is showing that tracking is turned on (green) while the second iPad shows that tracking is stopped (red).

It also no longer waste screen real estate on the slew rate slider -- the slew slider only appears when you tap on the rate button. It is also harder now to inadvertently change the slewrate.

Nope, still no ROI choice for main camera, except for the ASI6200.

Guide camera now supports dark frames. Dark frame for guiding is automatically built by ASIAIR. (It may be building a library to cover from 0.5 second exposures to 5 second exposures. English is unfortunately my third language, and I don't quite understand what the instruction says exactly.) I had earlier tested my guide scope against light leaks when it is capped, so I think I am good to go to give it a shot later tonight.

Guide window now shows the gain of the guide camera, so the GUI is now more consistent with the main window. Now, if only they let us tap on that gain text to access a gain slider -- quite often, you'd like to change the gain of the guide camera while looking at the peak ADU of a guide star (changes when you slew to different parts of the sky).

Good news for those using a 12.9" iPad pro -- the GUI elements (icons and text) are no longer scaled up; the physical size of buttons etc are mostly constant between a 12.9" and a 9.7" iPad. "Bin1" no longer appears as a ginormous icon.

Another good news: they finally shrunk the icon to access the planetarium. There is now more room to manually stretch the white and dark points on the histogram curve.

Chen

chrisastro Couldn't find it within the TestFlight app.

From past experience, I seem to get the beta a day or two earlier than most people. No, I am sure it has nothing to do with being retired from Apple, or my continued participation in the macOS and iOS developer program. Perhaps ZWO had flagged my TestFlight account so I can receive an earlier Beta (i.e., they could be doing staged releases) because I had (and still do) work with their developers directly. I also send them feedback in direct email instead of through the app (or, in the case of last night, sent then a link to this forum thread).

If people still don't see the new Beta today, I may have a clear enough night tonight to do more testing with dark frames with 5 second exposures, to see if it has any effect.

In general, the GUI takes up much less room now. Fonts are a little too small for my eyesight (over 70 years old with both eyes gone through cataract surgery).

There are still some text placement errors; the battery level in the top left corner of the window overlaps the version number of the ASIAIR, for example. And the fields for RA and declination are so tiny that I need to use my pinky finger to tap.

The height of the histogram has also shrunk, so it is much harder to see the inflection point where the curve goes from the sky background to the actual target's curve -- that is where I usually place the ASIAIR dark point slider (the ASIAIR "Auto" does not select that point).

Chen

ckoos

Chuck,

Interesting results with 5 second exposure.

When I tried it before the skies were completely dark, the use of dark frames gave more detected stars than without using dark frame (8 vs 6, for example). Quite consistently.

Now that is is mostly dark (still 30 minutes left before we leave astronomical twilight), there is no difference between using dark frames or not using dark frames (e.g., 11 stars with dark frames also gave 11 stars without dark frames), again quite consistently. If I use high gain.

However, when I use minimum gain, presumably larger read noise, the use of dark frames beat out not using dark frames handily. I just ran a case with 8 stars detected with dark frames and 5 stars detected without dark frames (notice that it could not be bad pixels, since bad pixels should have gotten rid of stars insted of adding them).

So, it looks like there is some gain to be had if you are using long guide exposures (and does not look like a simple BPM case), and if the guide train is marginal to start with. But if the SNR is already good and you already have plenty of guide stars, then I don't see any difference.

So far, I have not yet seen a case where the use of dark frames hurts. Whether short or long guide exposures. It is probably a case of turning it on and fuggetaboutit. Just takes a couple of minutes to build the dark frames anyway.

Chen

Astrobert If you select focus mode, you can adjust the EAF as known before.

Thank you, Robert. I see it now.

I see that it also allows a long press on an arrow button to keep the focuser moving.

The autofocus is still buggy, by the way. It still often stops outside the critical focus zone (or barely inside, so a 0.5ºC temperature change can knock it out of critical focus; requiring you to use "Reverse" to compensate, depending on the direction of the rack and pinion).

Chen

One good new addition in v2.0.0 beta, for those of us who choreograph our own meridian flips, is that the "time before Meridian" now shows up at the bottom of the AutoRun window even when you don't turn on auto meridian flip.

But there is a bug -- it reports "time before meridian" for the meridian between the pole and Nadir even when the target is not circumpolar :-). It would be more useful for non-circumpolar stars to report "time before horizon."

Chen