Simple intervalometer setting for creating timelapses

[Bluester]

Loosely related to the feature suggestion by Astroman (Which related back to me being tripped up by the 1000 iteration loop limit)

I have found BYE to be good for generating captures to create a time lapse, up to a point. Having ironed out some idiosyncrasies in my camera I can capture with the aperture priority setting to create a broadly well exposed set of images through a day/night cycle, with the camera yesterday ranging all the way from 1/4000th of a second to 15 second exposure times. The problem I have run into is that the lapse is uneven speed wise as the cycle time between images varies with the length of the exposure. Particularly when using the in camera dark frame subtraction. It results in a spread of time between images from approximately 5 seconds through to approximately 40 seconds.

Would it be possible to include a pure intervalometer function in the capture plans so that it would be possible to simply set an image cycle time somewhat longer than your maximum expected time to take and download the longest exposure image?

I have had issues where unless I insert several seconds delay on a looped plan something gets tied up in knots and BYE sits there waiting for the camera, so I would suggest inserting a hard coded 2 second delay minimum after image download before BYE requests a new exposure, but that issue may be related to the age of the equipment I am using (Old Camera and old laptop running Windows XP)

Obviously this suggestion would relate equally to BYN, which I also have a copy of. And hopefully I have not made a twit of myself by missing a setting somewhere that allows me to do this already

[admin]

1 hour ago, Bluester said:

...so that it would be possible to simply set an image cycle time somewhat longer than your maximum expected time to take and download the longest exposure image?

What does this mean?

[Bluester]

What I am getting at there is that I can set a cycle time, start of image to start of image. Unless I have misconstrued something, I can effectively only set a delay time between the end of one capture/download cycle and the start of the next. That leads to varying time between captures.

To make an example, using in camera dark frames, if the AV mode generates 15 seconds exposures, then the exposure and dark frame shot will take 30 seconds, then add a couple of seconds for the image download and for the camera to be ready to go again, Call it 35 seconds, whereas when the sky is much lighter the time to complete each frame would fall to only a couple of seconds. What I would like to be able to do is make an assumption about the longest exposure time that will occur and create a capture plan that takes each frame say 40 seconds after the preceding one was started rather than completed.

Using AV mode to control exposure and a short delay between frames, what I get is approximately 35 seconds between frames in the middle of the night but as the sky lightens and the exposure time reduces, the time between frame captures falls all the way to just a couple of seconds so when creating a time lapse the movement of the stars through the image starts out slowly and speeds up as the sky darkens, and then slows down again as it lightens in the morning.

There is almost certainly intervalometer software out there that could control the camera but BYE has other advantages that I would love to keep.  I would certainly put this one as a "Wish list" item rather than something urgent though.

[admin]

Okay I get it now