I was out again last night to image the Flying Horse Nebula NGC 7830. I used the Framing & Mosaic wizard to get my FOV that I wanted. Everything fine, right up to generating the Sequence. I then selected "Check Slew to target and then center. I was then presented with my sequence. After filling in all my parameters for exposure and filters etc, I checked the Target Setting and noted that the Slew To and Center On fields were populated with the correct co-ordinates.
I then selected “Run Sequence” The auto Plate Solve window pops up and the first step is successful. Then the Plate Solve generates a reference image(?) but to me it is highly unreadable. Now this is where I must be doing somehting wrong as I have tried this now with my ATIK 383l Mono CCD and now, last night, my ATIK 3l4e Mono CCD. The reference frame is not right. Am I missing some setting? Isn’t the camera supposed to take a frame and then the Plate Solver (in this case the Astrometry.net local solver) center the image? My problem is that with either camera, I am not getting a correct image. I had to abort on such a beautiful rare clear sky last night after banging my head agaist my table. I abandoned the Plate solve auto routine finally but did get close to my target from slewing the mount as per the pouplated fields in the Target Settings and got my images. There is nothing wrong with either camera…plate solving with astrometry.net local solver works as I have used it on many of my “final” images. What do I need to do to generate a reference Plate Solve image?
Incidentally, all my 30 frames turned out perfectly without using the auto plate solving routine, but I will need this feature if I am to do more than one panel…ie. a mosiac.
The “reference” frame, in this case, is inferred by the location data in target settings. It is essentially not used in the target centering process and will always succeed.
I have no idea. We cannot help you without logs.
Well… yes, that is the purpose of auto center. Maybe I am misinterpreting the question.
If I understand you correctly, you think that the image that your camera is
taking for plate solving is not a good image. Can you take a plate solve
image, right click on the image and then “save as mono fits”? Then share
the image with us (dropbox or something else). Also the log file will be
necessary, as Ken said.
I won’t be able to test until tonight. Can I or is it necessary, to take a
reference image binned at 1 x 1 for say, 3 minutes through, lets say, my Ha
filter and use that
as the reference image to do the auto Plate Solve?
No, you would want to use your lum filter for plate solving and 5-10sec
exposures. There’s really nothing else to be done until we see a log file
and a plate solve image.
Plate solving with NB filters is difficult (time consuming). I don’t understand what you mean when you are asking if you need to take a reference image. Center here has no reference image… as described above, the reference is implied by target location. You may be referring to the plate solve of the current position I think (step 2 or 4). If so, you want to plate solve between 2x2 and 4x4 with an exposure of about 8 seconds.
Again, if you’d like more assistance, we will need logs showing the behavior (and a copy of the image that failed to solve).
Hopefully you don’t need the much time to get it going…
Assuming you know your local ANSVR is up and healthy, this is all you should need to get centering going:
Step 1:
Make sure your mount has a pretty good sync (use a planetarium or a blind solve in SGPro). If your mount doesnt have a pretty good idea where it is, you are done from the start…
It sounds like you may have PHD2 setup to do this. If your mount uses an ASCOM connection to PHD2 (not on camera ST-4), then you should never really use this setting. Get a good calibration in PHD2 and then it will use and adjust this same calibration even between targets on different nights (adjusts for declination, pier side, etc…). You should not ever have to mess with the manual control buttons for PHD2… we might even remove them someday.
Once you have all this worked out, don’t forget to save your sequence as a profile so you don’t have to mess with these settings again. All new sequences will just use these settings and your “centering stuff” should just work with very little effort.
Thanks again for your instructions. My version of SGP is 2.4.211 which does
not show the Control Panel > Auto Guide option, “Re-calibrate auto guider
when target changes”.
Because the successful initial guiding was interrupted by SGP’s validation
process and then I got a guiding error, there must be another “switch” to
leave the initial guiding alone…right?
Could this “switch” be in PHD2 to not pause the guiding when slewing? I’m
using PHD2 Version 2.5.0 and under the Advanced Setup there is option, “Stop
guiding when mount slews”.
Would this stop SGP from triggering another guiding routine when not
necessary? Should it be checked?
If that option is not checked, we will never ask PHD2 to recalibrate… Only to resume guiding. If, as a result of this request, PHD2 does start recalibration, it is because it thinks it needs one.
If this doesn’t sound right to you, we will need logs to understand what you are seeing.
PHD2’s recalibration depends on whether you have the “Auto restore calibration” option checked in PHD2.
If you do not have the option checked, PHD2 will attempt to calibrate the first time you start guiding after opening PHD2.
If you do have the option checked, then PHD2 will only calibrate once and will not recalibrate again unless you explicitly clear the calibration.
I would recommend you do check the “Auto restore calibration” option in PHD2. If you setup in the field, do a calibration once as part of your setup at the beginning of the night. If you have a permanent setup, just calibrate once and forget about it.