After years and months of blood and sweat, I have finally managed to enjoy a full on Ekos experience from start to finish on my last night before going back home (observatory is in Germany, I live in the UK).

First, thanks a lot to the all of the dev team, the testers, and everybody else involved in making Kstars/Ekos what it is today.
Don't stop developing/testing/reporting bugs !!!!!

The other night, I was able to align the mount in about 30 min or so.
Tonight was again a super clear night (bar the full moon...) and my last one before heading back home, so I thought about giving the all system a good testing live.
All connections were fine minus my RG11 rain sensor driver that I need to fix (naming issue).

I started with a few slew to targets, it was still day light so I could see if any cables were going to be caught or not.
As darkness (or lack off, it's almost July after all....) was coming in, I tested the auto-focus, first manual to get some stars in instead of blobs.... then switch over to the auto method. Flawless work there, no issues what-so-ever using the standard values.

Once that was done, I tried the mount model, that I must say didn't work as I expected. Probably because I do not fully understand it (never had to use it until tonight....).

As you can see from the above picture, the dDE is way out and despite doing a 'Capture & Solve' > 'Slew to Target' the mount was getting every soooo slowly more accurate.
I've repeated this on many targets, had up nearly 70 iterations but this is too slow for my liking.
Please let me know what I was doing wrong.

I left the mount modelling alone and went into taking a few pictures (Atik 314+).
Here's a 60 sec of NGC6910

Which isn't too bad knowing that it's not guided, as what I was looking at was good, I pushed the envelope to 5 min unguided to see how much trailing I was going to get...
To my surprise, not much:


Which led me onto the guiding, again with standard values, I just hit the button 'Guide', it took a few minutes (just a few) to settle down and I heard the 'dong'.... it's guiding.

Now again, never used it before so I do not know why value works best.

One the guiding started, the wind picked up.... doh.

I took the same 5min picture but this time, guided. I let you be the judge.

It's not perfect, but considering that I was using all standard values in Ekos, it's pretty damn good.

Here's the link to nova : nova.astrometry.net/user_images/2173204#original
Really surprised by the outcome, check out the details, I'm amazed.


That's it for tonight, the next test will be done from 400 miles away... no pressure....

I had a look at your settings for the solver. I noted that you set the accuracy to 999 - that seems a lot. Also, the binning is 1x1. I left the accuracy at 30 (think is the default value), and put the binnning to 4x4. Not sure if youn have seen that Jasem updated the tutorials on YouTube, which was helping me a lot.

I myself had last week the first reasonably successful session, where all functions properly worked, after a bit more than one year. I spent a lot of time with assembling the Pi, with the diy focuser and so on.

Correct, it was set to 30 and I was getting nowhere so I bumped it to 999, that's the only value I changed really.
I shall take a look at the latest videos.


OK, watched I shall change the settings and see how it goes.

I'm getting failed alignements too. Its constantly trying to solve and correct but never moves the scope in the right direction or not enough. So I end up with 200" of error or so.

Hi!

I also thought other than for the almost full moon it was a pretty decent night (well, as "decent" as it gets in downtown Frankfurt). Your drift plot shows aberrations of up to 4" which leaves room for improvement.

I recommend

1) using 2x2 binning. (At a focus of just 162mm it could be better to leave it at 1x1 binning. Try both settings.)
2) I noticed ~7s between guiding pulses although exposure is set to 1,5s. This probably is because you are using full frame guiding. Try ticking the "subframe" box. This will speed things up a lot.
3) If your guider has an ST4 port try using it instead of guiding via the mount.

In the end your result should look like this...

This happens to me too occasionally. To solve it I slew to a bright star nearby (including plate solving) and then back to the target. This usually solves it. Also cleaning the alignment model helps if the slew-to-a-star procedure doesn't work.

Thanks wvreeven, I tried your suggestions but its not consistently working. there seems to be two modes but the one that appears to use relative motion doesn't re-iterate. I would have thought it would always use relative motion as one does not necessarily have an alignment model when using the plate solving initially.

Which mounts have issues with alignment module? Celestron? I recall someone mentioned that Celestron requires "nudging" to get it to work reliably with alignment module and there were even some efforts to code this in but nothing in production. Never had issues here with EQMod (HEQ5 and EQ8).

Yup. I’m using the classic HEQ Pro with EQMOD driver. The problem has been present for the last 2 releases I think

Edit. Via hand controller in direct pc mode.

Me on a SkyWatcher HEQ5Pro with the EqMod driver.

I also have an HEQ5 pro.
Might have an idea, after a few solves trying to align the mount I should have released the clutch and move the mount to align the star in the center and redo my park position? maybe?

Can you share logs? INDI+Mount+Align need to be checked in the Ekos logs dialog.