I am in the process of commissioning SGPro. I have a C14 Edge HD on a Paramount MX+ Mount and an SBIG 16803 camera, with the STX-FW7 filter wheel and STX Autoguider. These are bolted together and attached to the OTA via an adaptor of a dimension designed to give the correct set-back distance from the OTA to the camera sensor. The adaptor screws on to the baffle lock nut at the back of the OTA and is bolted directly to the OAG/ FW/ Camera assembly. I focus with the primary mirror and I have a Feather Touch Focuser and Handy Motor.
I have used The SkyX to this point, but wish to utilise the superior capabilities of SGPro for my DSO projects.
Last night around started a commissioning run around 11:26 AEST (I am based on the Eastern Seaboard of Australia). I have so far managed to get everything working on a project to image M83, except at the last step, after auto guiding is underway wth PHD Guiding, the sequence simply does not commence. In the message bar at the bottom of the screen it says “Resuming the auto guider…” but from there the time counts down, but the sequence does not begin, nor is there any indication from the timer that progress is being made. PHD Guiding says that it is guiding and all looks normal in that regard.
I did have some trouble finding guide stars as the focal length is long and I ended up having to re-centre to a slightly different position to find a decent one. I restarted the sequence (by this stage I had stopped the auto-focus routine, but it had worked successfully at the outset), everything connected and PHD found a star and began guiding, but then it failed to commence the imaging sequence. I tried this a couple of times with the same result. I pulled up at 12:10am as I could go no further.
The following DropBox link is to a folder that includes the logs and the Sequence file itself as well as some screen shots that I took during the capture sequence.
I hope they are of help in diagnosing my issue and any help gratefully received.
Thanks & regards,
Niall MacNeill
From my personal experience, and a friend of mine, communication problems between SGP and PHD2 are not uncommon. Mine has been inconsistent; sometimes it works fine, sometimes it hangs. I wonder if either PHD does not receive the command, or if SGP is not picking up the response? Maybe some retries and comms channel resets might be in order? I have some experience (not a ton, though) with inter-process comms, and it’s not uncommon for retries to be needed…
I’d recommend getting on target and then starting auto guiding and then starting up the sequence. While SGP can start completely from scratch just with a “Run Sequence” click, there are many things that have to go right for this to work.
Also sometimes PHD2 and SGP can stop talking and a way to reset this communication is to Pause and Resume guiding from within SGP on the Auto Guide tab of the control panel.
Thanks Jared and to the other contributors.
A friend of mine, Rodney Watters, who is a very experienced SGPro user, diagnosed the issue from the log. The default “Settle at X pixels” is for an X value of 0.3. PHD Guiding was unable to achieve this. I changed the value to 1.5 pixels after a look at the guiding performance and the sequence commenced shortly after the autoguiding started.
May I suggest that the message “resuming the auto-guider” , could be more helpful in diagnosing this issue. Perhaps after some multiple of the number of seconds specified, an error message saying something like “unable to start sequence as guider has not settled within specified tolerance”, would prompt the end-user to check whether the tolerance set is reasonable.
Thanks again, Niall
Further to Niall’s post, I have copied in below an extract from the log file that we used in diagnosing this issue. The PHD listener thread reports that the guider settle action has failed. From our observations, SGP Pro stalled at that point as it seemed to be waiting in an infinite loop for PHD to report back. As Niall indicated, by changing the settling parameters to a more tolerant setting, PHD was able to meet the settling criteria and the sequence resumed satisfactorily.
It does seem strange that SGP Pro can hang like this waiting for the resume state to complete. I support Niall’s recommendation to have a pre-defined time out period after which SGP Pro would return control back to the user with an error message.
It would be appreciated Jared if we could have your thoughts on this.
[05/24/20 23:26:35.864][DEBUG][Sequence Thread][SQ;] Something has gone wrong while attempting to resume auto guiding, but recovery mode is NOT active!