Wondering if anyone else is experiencing odd profile issues with the new release? Mine are related to both the equipment and the user. Sometimes the saved profiles have totally disappeared so I cannot choose the same I used during the previous session and sometimes they disappear even during the sequence, meaning I’ll start the sequence with a profile and at some point I’ll notice that there is no profile in the sequence anymore.
Finally, the oddest thing is that all my profiles have the focus pixel size changed to 1x1 and after a while, no matter what profile I use, the autofocus shows the initial pixel size of 6x6. Anyone else noticed this?
The disappearing profile names is not new to the latest release, it has been going on for some time.
The most annoying one is when the profile name disappears from the Profile Selector list when you are creating multiple sequences, one right after the other and you have to exit SGP to get it back into the list.
The other is the case of the equipment profile or user profile name disappearing from the sequence title bar. I have found that the profile/user data is still added to the fits file so it is only a minor annoyance.
The disappearing profile is generally because the profile has been corrupted. We’re actively working to track this issue down and address it. I have not seen nor heard of the Issue with the AF binning changing. I’ll keep an eye out for that.
Thanks guys. I noticed yesterday that the pixel size is related to a target. So I have to choose the wanted pixel size to each target in my sequence separately and then it doesn’t disappear (I think…). Not sure if this is the was it was meant to work but that’s how I got it now work.
Here’s another one; From where does the Equipment Profile take the camera pixel scale? The correct one for my combo should be 0.97 and the equipment profile keeps changing this to 0.99. Not sure from where that is coming from, focal length and everything else should be correct.
And I think this might be the reason also why my final plate solve has started to fail. The coarse first plate solve goes still OK but the solve fails to get the scope centered within the 50 pix limit.
Not getting to the centering limit is an ongoing problem with SGP where it doesn’t seem to be running a true closed loop control where it should determine the error and then force the scope to center away from the target so that the next plate solve shows it bang on target. This would eliminate all mount errors and achieve what Centre claims to achieve through plate solving. It appears the developers are only taking the actual coordinates from Plate Solve and telling the mount to go to the target again. This leaves us in a never ending loop of only ever getting close to the target, in a perfectly repeatable way, but never right on it because the systematic/calculation errors in the mount are never removed.
I suspect your 0.99 issue is coming from the plate solve reporting back what your actual scale is rather than what you have calculated from equipment specs.
Thanks. I don’t remember having issue before so I might go back to one of the previous versions. Yes it’s frustrating when you see the target right there and the plate solve just keeps looping.
So this got so bad last evening that I actually went back to ver. 2.6. I spend the first part of the night not being able to plate solve and that was enough. I was looking the sequence to start, mount slewing to the target and first plate solve photo taken. Plate solve happens immediately and the first plate solve is off by 80 pix or so and the mount nudges a bit and the second image is taken. After that the plate solve fails every time even when the target is right smack in the middle.
I’m still thinking that this comes from the pixel scale issue where frame and focus scale used doesn’t match the actual pixel scale (0.99 vs. 0.97) but maybe I’m wrong. Now when creating a new target, I make sure that while doing the F&F, it’s exactly 0.99 when I create the target. I haven’t check yet how the rest of the last night turned out and if this helped.
This is unlikely to be the problem as most solvers have some “wiggle room” in the actual scale. Are you using a blind solve fail over? If you can post a log and an image that has failed to solve I can take a look.
Jared people at the Cloudy Nights seem to agree with you that the pixel error is too small to affect to this. So I agree that this probably is a profile issue. I’ve had two successful nights with 2.6 now, other than during the first night at some point I still got the “unhandled exception has occurred…” message and last night when the Meridian flip happened, the plate solve failed first, went to blind solve and while the blind solve was still running, it tried another solve at the same time which also succeeded immediately. So I had two plate solve windows open at the same time! I’ve never seen this before.
I can try to find the log during the weekend if you are still interested to see it.
OK, always something… I added a new target today (still using now ver. 2.6) and noticed that the planning tools are missing now. Any thoughts on this anyone?
So I went back to 3.x as I really like the planning tools. Started from the scratch, deleted everything including all profiles and reinstalled the SGP. Plate Solve seems to be working except one time during the Meridian Flip. I don’t know what happened but I had two Plate Solve and an Autofocus window open at the same time. But somewhere in the background one Plate Solve must have succeeded as the program recovered itself. Below is a link to the log in case this phenomenon interests someone.
Have you looked into this anymore and is it possible that there is a bug? Based on some Cloudy Nights posts I’m not alone. Or would the new revision possible solve this issue also?
I had the same issue again yesterday and it seems to happen now during the Meridian Flip. I had three Plate solve windows open simultaneously and somewhere in the background a 4th one most have succeed as the autofocus routine started. And apparently all this was too much as at that point the whole system crashed.