Automatic move from park and start sidereal

Sequence Generator Feature Requests
1

I have noticed that there is no option for SGPro to automatically unpark the telescope, enable sidereal rate and start the plate solving to center an object, for example on my EQ8 pro, I have EQMOD have the following

  1. Defined Park Position - This is used for closing my observatory roof
  2. Defined Unpark Position - This is the position my telescope goes to at the start of any imaging night, and this is the position my initial Solve and Sync Blind is performed

The goal here would be to say at the start of the image sequence

  1. Unpark to the defined position
  2. Enable sidereal rate
  3. Centre object (Which would perform a solve and sync to get the current position)
  4. Perform the guider calibration (Or restore last calibration for pier mounted setups)

Would that be easy to integrate?

Regards
Simon

2

Simon,

If you set up a start time in your sequence, it will automatically unpark the mount. If you tell it to ‘slew’ in the sequence, it will automatically slew to the first target. And, if you turn on ‘center’ in the sequence, it will also center the target.

PHD2 has options for calibration and saving calibrations. SGP would prefer that you have it calibrated already when you start, but you can force PHD2 to re-calibrate per target or have it re-use calibration (if you have an obs for instance).

Hope that helps,
Chris

3

@mads0100

But what it does not have the option of is enabling sidereal on the mount, this has to be done manually, so in order to have a sequence start, sidereal rate must be running, therefore the telescope is not parked. Or am I imissing a setting somewhere?

Simon

4

Simon,

My mount (Gemini-2 Mi-250) starts tracking as soon as the mount is unparked and is commanded to slew. I would talk with the ASCOM developer and see if they can fix this. SGP is issuing the commands correctly.

Chris

5

Hi Simon. If you are using EQMOD then sidereal rate is automatically enabled when the mount is unparked and sent to a target. I’m assuming that unpark in SGP triggers the unpark in EQMOD which in turn would enable sidereal rate. Chris, would this sound about right? Simon, you could check with Chris (the other Chris) on the EQMOD site.

Cheers,

Gord

6

I just did a check

  1. Telescope parked to defined position
  2. Clicked on “Slew Now”

The telescope did not “Unpark” and remained parked

After I “Unparked to defined position”, again I chose Slew Now and the telescope slewed and tracking was automatically set to sidereal

7

That’s great. That is exactly how it should work. EQMOD requires an unpark before it will allow a slew.

Cheers,

Gord

8

CLE,

Did you run a sequence? Or did you just tell it from a target to ‘slew now’? If you run a sequence, SGP will tell the mount to unpark and. if you’ve selected it to slew, it will slew, and, if you’ve selected it to center, it will center the target.

Hope that is clear,

Chris

9

@mads0100

That worked! Wow over the past few days I have learned a number of things about software I;ve been using for a few years…lol

Thanks
Simon

1 Like
10

It’s pretty awesome :slight_smile:️

11

One of the reasons for Park is to prevent inadvertent slews when, for instance, the observatory roof is closed. Attempts to move the mount when it’s parked will throw a parked exception.
UnPark removes this restriction and restores the tracking state.

1 Like
12

We explicitly call unpark and enable tracking after calling unpark. For whatever reason not all mounts automatically enable tracking.

Thanks,
Jared

1 Like