Is there an easy way to combine multiple guiding sections from the same guide log in PHD2 Log Viewer?

[John Engstrom]

This is probably a question for Andy Galasso (author of PHD2 Log Viewer) but maybe someone here has an idea.  The problem I'm facing is I'd like to see an entire night's guiding as a single section in PHD2 Log Viewer.  Since I'm using an OAG and my imaging application is set to disable guiding on autofocus (and I autofocus every 30 minutes) and then resume guiding after the autofocus, I end up with guiding sections in PHD2 Log Viewer that are ~30 minutes long.  And depending on the night that could mean 20+ guiding sections.

Apart from hand editing the PHD2_GuideLog to remove the stop/start guiding sections (which would be a pain and easy to mess up), is there a way to combine multiple sections into a single section in PHD2 Log Viewer?  Or maybe a way to view more than one section at. a time?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

--John Engstrom

 

[bw_m...@earthlink.net]

No, there’s no way to do that.  However, I think if you tell your imaging app to pause guiding rather than start/stopping it, the guiding sessions won’t be segmented.

 

Bruce

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[lmcl...@umich.edu]

I agree, this would be a very useful feature.  I too autofocus every hour so there gets to be a lot of different sections.

Perhaps pausing guiding during autofocus would work.  But when I initially asked Ivo to add this to APT (the imaging program I use), it didn't work.  I'll have to try it again and work with him to get it working.

But regardless of this, it would be a nice feature to have a "Combine Sections" button in PHD2 Lot Viewer.

Lamar

[Bruce Waddington]

If you want to push for this, you should direct your requests to Andy's GitHub for LogViewer:

https://github.com/agalasso/phdlogview

Frankly, I've never seen any need for this.  You should also be able to do it yourself with a modest amount of scripting to process the guide log file - it's just a text file.

Bruce

[Jens Scheidtmann]

Using ChatGPT it should be easy to generate a python script, that manipulates the file as you want it. If ChatGPT doesn‘t do it, one off the more specialized ones will do it (GitHub Copilot and Claude.AI come to mind)

Hope this helps, Jens

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[John Engstrom]

Thanks Bruce.  I use NINA and they have a "Disable Guiding During AutoFocus" checkbox.  I'll post a request on their Discord and ask if that can be changed to pause guiding when using PHD2 as the guider rather than stop/start guiding.

[Bruce Waddington]

I don't think this should replace the current behavior - if anything, perhaps it could be offered as an option for people who want to operate this way.  I think most people wouldn't choose that option and it would look like a "breaking change" they would be quite unhappy about.

[Dale Ghent]

The root issue is an information display issue in a completely unrelated-to-NINA log-viewing app; an app which exists to view logs generated by a program that also isn't NINA itself. How one has arrived at determining that it is NINA that must change in order to alter the log-viewing app's presentation of information is boggling to say the least. NINA's way of managing PHD2 has worked fine, will continue to work fine, and NINA's not going to change or complexity be added just to accommodate something like this.

Consider, for at least a moment, that PHD2 Log Viewer is the entity concerned with parsing and displaying the PHD2 log information. Is it too much of a stretch to conclude that *it* would be the app that should change in terms of how it displays information in certain cases? In fact, there appears to already be an open issue in PHD2 Log Viewer's source code repo that is related to its handling of interstitial periods of no activity:

https://github.com/agalasso/phdlogview/issues/17

I suggest that an issue be filed there to cover the start/stop case, or piping up in this existing case explaining that the display of stop/start events could also use some flexibility.

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