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I am striving to greatly reduce, if not eliminate, my MS Windows installations in advance of October 2025. I really do not want to deal with Windows 11 and forcing it to accept my CPUs. I do not plan to buy 7 new computers to make Microsoft feel secure when Linux runs just fine on all of them. Yes, I have 8 computers today, plus 2 Raspberry Pis, and only 1 is Windows 11 "ready". It happens to be one of the slowest CPUs as well! I have managed to migrate all my non-astronomy computers to Linux without issue. I actually find Pix Insight quite a bit faster now!
I have a StarMaster which uses a rather old Sky Commander and Star Tracker hardware made by Sky Engineering. There is an ASCOM driver for this. It was developed by an individual, not a company. As I see it, I have two options.
1. Replace the Sky Engineering boxes with OnStep hardware. This seems quite doable, but far from trivial.
2. Figure out a way to "use" the ASCOM driver.
I will probably continue to run some favorite tools in Wine like SkyTools since I think I'm willing to give up that program being able to directly issue goto commands.
At this point I am gathering options so all crazy thoughts are welcome.
Mark
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Hmmm.
Humidity is NOT a problem at this time of year in Arizona. But I don’t have a better explanation for why this might be failing. I suppose this contact spray might be worth a try.
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An example from this evening:
Computer clock: 23 Apr 20:30
KStars: 23 Apr 02:35
This is worse than a water clock. More like a hamster wheel, with a sleepy hamster.
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I modified the train so the guide device is set to "--".
It was previously set to "Mount".
Thanks to both.
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Hi John,
I had noticed that in some instances (occured twice for me but couldnt get it to replicate), the focuser would continue to gather more points but the graph never appeared. I had to shutdown and reload Kstars. Dont know if anyone else encountered this
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Hi Keith,
I thought I'd fixed all instances of focus not reseting properly which is probably what you're referring to. Of course its possible there's a case I've missed or you could be on an old version of kstars?
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OK, I'll get that information for you later today. Another problem was the autofocus feature "running off" while it was trying to find stars.
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For example - my system finds focus near "21450" +/- 100 ticks. While searching for and not finding stars, it keeps focusing "outwards" by 1000 ticks every failed autofocus run and the scheduler keeps trying.
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Is there a way to keep the scheduler and autofocus routine within a reasonable distance of where the last good focus was found?
.
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If you have a contact cleaner spray, it can help: It the WD-40 Contact cleaner has saved some HDMI and USB connectors in past. Now, if I find them, I’m trying to buy golden plated cables for astrophotography because the humidity of the night is a big issue.
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Hi Simon, I tried it out and found it quite challenging to get the balance of gain & exposure correct (using ASICap) to show the details. Its either too dim or too bright 
I need to find more time to do this more leisurely.
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None = no guilding
Mount = guilding images are sent from the guide camera to the computer running the Guide module / PHD2. Guide / PHD2 works out pulses to move the mount to keep the guide star(s) in the correct position and sends from the computer directly to the mount. So there needs to be a connection from the computer running guiding to the mount. This is usually called pulse guiding.
Camera = guilding images are sent from the guide camera to the computer running the Guide module / PHD2. Guide / PHD2 works out pulses to move the mount to keep the guide star(s) in the correct position and sends from the computer back to the guide camera. The Guide camera sends the pulses to the mount so there needs to be a connection from the Guide camera to the mount. This is called ST4 guiding.
ST4 was the original way to do guiding. Pulse guiding is now the usual way as it involves 1 less connection (guide cam to mount) and 1 less hop for the guide pulses to have to make.
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Hi Keith,
There are a number of reasons why you might get this error. For me to be more helpful you'd need to post of the log with verbose Focus logging set on. But here are some thoughts in the interim...
You imply sometimes Focus was working, sometimes there were issues so seems to be an intermittent problem. You also mention you could make out stars in the frames where Focus was saying no stars were detected. This would fit with some sub-optimal parameter settings that work some of the time but not always.
You could post screenshots of the parameter settings and I could comment on those. Alternatively, you could run FocusAdvisor and let it update your parameters. Usually FocusAdvisor will pick a reasonable set of parameters for most systems that will minimise the sort of problem you have.
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How do I get a more "stable" version for Ubuntu 24.04 as there is not yet a nightly build for this platform available?
Or how can I install a previous INDI version? V2.0.6 or 2.0.5?
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