Looking forward to getting autoguiding working again.

The latest release resolved the guide calibration problem with my Celestron AVX mount.

Now the autoguiding seems to have a new problem.  The calibration procedure appears to work but the guiding performance is extremely poor.  No good frames were captured. 

The log file will show that after guiding was turned off, unguided dithering was turned on.
Looking forward to getting autoguiding working again.

The latest release resolved the guide calibration problem with my Celestron AVX mount.

Now the autoguiding seems to have a new problem.  The calibration procedure appears to work but the guiding performance is extremely poor.  No good frames were captured. Can anyone recommend a tutorial on the operation of the latest guider version?

The log file will show that after guiding was turned off, unguided dithering was turned on.

TIA

 

I'd be happy to look at your issue. I couldn't tell from your log, though, which guiding scheme you were using, and the log record much info.
Could you please:

• Use SEP MultiStar guiding (in the Guide Options menu, Guide tab, set algorithm to SEP MultiStar),
• Include a screenshot of that tab and the calibration tab,
• Include a screenshot of the main Guide tab,
• Include the guide log (which is found in a sister directory to the logs directory named guidelogs.
• Make sure in the main Logs menu, you have guide logging turned on (I believe you do) and verbose logging to File (I believe you do, but please check).
• If it's easy to run with PHD2, you may also want to try and run their guiding assistant and let us know what the output is.

Then try again and let us know how it goes.

Thanks,
Hy

Thanks for the response.

SEP Multistar was selected.
The screenshot shows Guide logging turn on but I had selected that after the imaging session.
Thanks for the response.

SEP Multistar was selected.
The screenshot shows Guide logging turn on but I had selected that after the imaging session.

I will not have an opportunity to do imaging for several weeks.  Fortunately I photographed the guiding and session summary screens last night.  The guiding actually performed well some of the time last night.  It appeared that there was a problem after dithering between exposure that required a bit of time to recover.  Is it possible that the dithering is not accounted for in the guiding which requires the guiding to override for the dithering offset?

Help in understanding the guiding process and the contents of the log files would be appreciated.

Ed  

The guide_log file can be opened with the phdlogview program
openphdguiding.org/phd2-log-viewer/
if you want to analyze your logging after-the-fact.

The dithering should be accounted for, but you could also enable a flag in capture, near the bottom left there's a subtab named guide limits, and you can set "only start if guide deviations < 2" or something like that.

There are two analyze tab's guide rms graphs, one of them only shows deviations during captures, which is really what you care about. It's the rms on the 3rd line. Probably only want to show that one.

There are a lot of web resources on how to improve guiding, many put out by the PHD2 folks. You should check them out. For example:
www.google.com/search?q=phd2+guiding+tut...ceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Many of the things that improve PHD2 also apply to the internal EKos guider.
Also, you can run either the PHD2 guider and the Ekos guider with KStars/Ekos.


 

Hy,

Thanks for the info. I installed the PHD log viewer and downloaded the phd2 manual. This will keep me busy for some time.

Ed

The log file and the document describing what irregularities to look for was very helpful. The one obvious problem with my mount is the backlash or sluggishness in the DEC drive when dithering. Several 10's of seconds were often required to compensate for the declination error after dithering. I spent the day disassembling the DEC axis system and attempting to reduce the backlash and the sluggishness of the axis. It is not known whether any improvement was made in the performance. Testing will have to wait for clear skies.

Ed

Still having trouble with declination guiding.  The guide log shows that sometimes it appears that the mount does not respond to declination guiding commands.  RA guiding is fine.  My best guess is that there is a mechanical problem with the declination axis motor control.  Possibly excessive backlash or stiction.   Would appreciate if someone could look at the attached log an offer an assessment.

Ed