Hi folks!

Some questions..

Guiding from home over the internet seem to give different results from guiding at my observatory, Is there a way to improve that or is it just that everything is a bit slower over the net ??

Often when I choose a star to guide at the green box jumps away from my chosen star even to places there is no star at all?? and I have to choose a guidestar again, sometimes I even have to do a starselection 10-15 times before the green box stays at the star, why is it doing that ??

And the resolver again, well.. tested to resolve multiple times without luck, and when sending the pic maually to astrometry it resolves in a couple of seconds, now I also tested the offline resolver but no luck

Last night I tried "Custom" settings instead "Sidereal", but my mount stopped respondig but came to life after restarting indiserver and everything else, a bit scary because in worst case I had to drive to the observatory in the middle of the night, so I think it's best not to use Custom rate for EQ8 even if it would be nice, maybe this feature is just for other mounts ??

Camera : SXVR-H9
Mount : SW EQ8

Well, thats something to begin with

Br
/Markku

Local vs remote guiding: yes, this is likely to be an issue due to latency. You would be better to get the guiding running at the observatory itself.

The offline resolver can be tricky to tune and while I've got mine to a state I'm mostly happy with, it's still not perfect. I tuned it by running on the command line first and then adjusting the settings in ekos - you need to look at the "solve-field" command in your astrometry install.

If possible, try to set good values for the -L, -H and -u options - they're the scale estimates.
I also use --resort --downsample 2 --objs 200.
Another option to explore is -5 or --radius. I've got mine set to 30 but could probably drop that a bit.

If you've got enough memory on machine maybe running it in parallel mode could speed things up too.

Are you using regular guiding or "Rapid Guide"? With RapidGuide enabled, all the guiding calculations are performed on the server side and only the final results are sent to Ekos, so in situations where the link is not fast or reliable, RapidGuide is the way to go. But I did notice that with RapidGuide, sometimes it may select a region with no visible guide stars so it's a hit and miss. With regular guiding, it shouldn't jump around as it will select whatever was chosen by the user. If you see that behavior in regular guiding, please send me the frames (.fits) where this happen so I can investigate.

Not sure regarding custom rates, I think Jean-Luc would be best to ask about this.

Hi guys!

Thank you lazjen for the tips, I thought the net is a bit slow and could affect the guiding but not that much, but it's better to be at home than in a cold observatory.

I'll try tweaking the options more than I did before regarding the resolver, also will try commandline too, not shure how to do that but I'll figure it out.


Jasem, Usually I use regular guiding but I would like to use "Rapid Guide" of course, It would be great if it was possible to start with regular guiding and after that select "Rapid Guide" on the fly ? then I would see that it is locked at the star and not jumping away somewhere else, maybe you could make that possible ??

I'm not shure how to save guidecam frames automatically, maybe I've missed taht feature ??

Thank you!
Br
/Markku

Sitting here now trying to figure out things..

One problem is solved at last If I use "-L 16.9000 -H 22.7000 -u dw" in the resolver then I get nearly every picture resolved, I got the figures from a manual solving, very glad for that but dont know why Ekos sets the values "-L 14.6032 -H 21.6032 -u dw" ??

Then another thing came up, it's the "Swap"-thing, why does it enable itself ?? and why does it do that nearly randomly sometimes??
Seems that if I do my first calibration pointing West things work out as normal when working at West, but when I go East I have to calibrate again and the "Swap" turns on by itself, well.. a bit logical.. but the guiding goes nuts.
When starting first calibration at East and working at East everything is fine, then going to the Western side and everything works just fine.. but sometimes I have to do a new calibration and then the Swap turns on..
So to my conclusion, when changing from East to Weast or West to East its better to start everything from scratch to getting it to work..??

I'm a bit confused about that behavior, can somebody explain that ??
Br
/Markku

What's your FOV?

Regarding the "Swap", it is determned automatically from the calibration step, and when you switch to the other side of the meridian, it turns on. It is put there in case Ekos calculation is for some reason wrong and you have the ability to switch it on and off. Now, if I start either east or west, and the scope is tracking, no change is required at all, unless you SLEW to the other side of the meridian in that case another calibration is required. I could perhaps just swap the declination switch when changing meridian, but this requires more testing still.

My FOV is about 20.58' x 15.37' , astrometry says 22.70 x 16.90 arcmin and Ekos says 15.80 x 11.0 arcmin, so actually I'm not very shure, I thought Ekos wold know that because it knows my scope and cam.

That can explain a lot usually i do SLEW past meridian but it wold be better to swap declination, like last night when I went from West to East I could'nt get the guiding working again, calibration went ok but guiding did not, when guiding started it took maybe 10-15sec. and it got nuts then I tried with Swap but it did the same thing and it didn't change behavior at all with Swap on or off.
I also thought that maybe it is my Lodestar that messed up guiding ?? I dont know if it needs to get a Reset-signal or something before Calibration to work correctly ?? that could explain why I sometimes have to restart everything from scratch when going past meridian.. (just a thought)

Anyway, if you want me to test anything I'll be happy to help!

Br
/Markku

what's the image resolution ccd pixel size, and telscope focal length?

OTA is SW 300P 305mm/1500mm
Pixelsize is 6.45u x 6.45um / active area is 8,98mm x 6.70mm / diagonal is 8.98 , it's a SXVR-H9 and according to astrometry arcsec/pixel is 0.977
That's it

what's the image resolution in pixels (widthxheight)?

Hmm.. do you mean 1392x1040 ?? or something else ??

Ok I found the issue, Ekos _always_ uses the main telescope focal length when calculating FOV. Now there if a checkbox next to FOV called OAGT (Off Axix Guide Telescope), if checked will use the guide scope focal length to calculate the FOV. Please check if this works for you.