Hi everyone,
I would like to set up my system while it is still daylight with a delay to start at the appropriate time, but there is one problem. My system is trying to do an initial plate solve before it goes into the waiting hibernation. This, of course, causes problems because it is too bright see any stars much less do a plate solve. This causes a sequence fail. Is there anything that I can get it to do to avoid this problem, i.e. not try to plate solve until the sequence run begins? Am I making any sense?
How are you setting up the time delay? That may be the problem. I have no trouble clicking RUN before dark to set in motion the night’s imaging session. I set the starting time for the first target to the time I want the run to start executing. SGP says in the info bar “Waiting until 7:20 PM to start ‘First Target’”. Only at 7:20 PM does it slew to ‘First Target’ and do the plate solve.
I don’t know of any adjustments to delayed start other than checking it and putting in the time. Let me give you an example of what happened tonight. I set the delayed time for 7 pm. When I ran the sequence it immediately tried to run a reference plate solve. When that failed because it was too light, it said that it was waiting for 7pm and this time it did start at 7, but some strange things were happing in plate solve. On the status line, the normal information was missing and it kept flashing plate solving even though an image was trying to .integrate. I went to the control panel to try to stop plate solve, and I got a message to terminate the sequence. Finally, i had to restart the software. Something like this happens every time I start the sequence in the daylight. It tries to take a priliminary plate solve before waiting for the delayed time and when that fails it goes berserk.
I think SGP should wait with that till the start time of the first target. I have the feeling that this is a bug and Ken or Jared might want to look into this. We might even get a “Sequene start time” option.
That’s interesting. In anticipation of that potential problem, I had unchecked the manual rotation to 90 degrees on the first target, but it apparently didn’t make any difference.