Last night after a fair few weeks of reading, trial and error and fiddling, I finally managed to get a half decent shot of a deepsky object (Tarantula Nebula).
All seemed to be going well so I headed off to hit the hay and at 2.00am got up to pack the gear (I woke up and remembered the sprinklers were going to come on - a big ouch!).
Unfortunately, though I noticed it only ran the first part of the sequence before aborting. I wasn’t sure if it is a filter wheel change issue or a focus issue or both.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time going through the manual to no avail so thought I would post here for help.
The errors in the log are:
[05/06/17 22:47:12.838][DEBUG] [PHD2 Listener Thread] Unknown object from PHD2: {“Event”:“Alert”,“Timestamp”:1494082032.830,“Host”:“UBERASTROLAPPY”,“Inst”:1,“Msg”:“Your Max RA Duration setting is preventing PHD from making adequate corrections to keep the guide star locked. Increase the Max RA Duration setting to allow PHD2 to make the needed corrections.”,“Type”:“warning”}
[05/06/17 22:47:35.918][DEBUG] [Camera Thread] Aborting change focus for filter because at least one of the filters in question does not have a focus position set.
Attached is the log file if that assists (I had to zip it as it was too big otherwise).
I’m using an Orion Magnificent Mini AutoGuider (that’s the 50mm guidescope with the starshooter autoguider) with a standard USB cable. It’s going through a powered USB hub though so wonder if it might be that. It does come with the RJ12 cable so assume that’s for ST-4? (I’ve never used it to connect to the mount direct).
I polar aligned using the polemaster so happy that it was pretty well aligned and guiding starts out fine.
No I didn’t do a calibarate (at least I don’t think I did). I feel like a dope saying that as it seems an obvious thing to do but is not said anywhere that I can find.
Information about when calibration is required is available in the PHD2 User Guide. In a nutshell: you can keep using the same calibration as long as you keep the guide camera in the same orientation, but only if you have PHD2 connected to the mount with an ASCOM connection.
I can see from your screenshot that you have a really bad calibration, and that in itself could explain why PHD2 was unable to keep the guide star locked and why you got the error in SGP. Note the high orthogonality error (it should be close to zero). When you did that calibration, PHD2 would have popped up an error message that said:
The RA and Declination angles computed in the calibration are questionable. Normally, these angles will be nearly perpendicular, having an ‘orthogonality error’ of less than 10 degrees.
You’ll need to resolve that problem for PHD2 to be able to guide effectively. I’d recommend posting your PHD2 logs in the PHD2 forum so we can help you diagnose the issue.
The PHD grand master beat me to the response. I had a similar calibration result in the past and it was because I moved the mount and didn’t close PHD or clean the calibration data. When I fired SGP up the next day autoguiding went nutz
I think as a starting point, I will go back to first principles - make sure EQMOD is set up correctly for the Skywatcher AZ-EQ6 GT (it is not a selection in the list of mounts so have asked the Yahoo group for details), then rerun the Calibration after having read the manual (basically the issue is I moved the guide scope by accident… Doh!).
Once that’s done, I will give it another go and see what diff it makes. I suspect it will make quite a bit and then post up accordingly.
