a couple of times now my mount has ended up pointing into the trees which caused an autoguide restart failure. this happened in the middle of the night, so i’m not exactly sure what SGP was doing, but the net result was that the dialog box stayed open all night which prevented the sequence from ending (and thus the mount kept tracking).
luckily 1) the OTA was on the east side of the pier and 2) had it been on the west APCC would have stopped the mount before it tracked into the pier. but it seems like this particular dialog box needs the “auto-close” functionality to allow the UI to unblock and the sequence to end.
sorry i was not clear - the dialog box says something to the effect of “autoguider could not be automatically restarted, please start the guider by hand”. when i closed that dialog box the “end of sequence” dialog box was behind it. i’m not sure what it was doing when the “restart by hand” dialog came up, but maybe it was after a new target being centered.
I am away from home just now - cannot do screen shots for you or even find the exact items to look at BUT…I would hazard a guess that the guider equipment profile in SGP is not the same as the equipment profile actually in use on your guide software (PHD2?)
this only happens intermittently, it correlates with the telescope tracking into the trees (or fog rolling in). if the guider can see stars, it does not happen. so i don’t see how a equipment profile mismatch would cause this.
whatever the cause, a modal dialog is no good because it blocks the ui which apparently blocks the thread that is running the sequence.
I am still guessing it only happens when you lose a guide star AND the sequence aborts. When SGP tries to recover the sequence it tries to restart the guider automatically. It tries to restart the guider as set up in the SGP guider profile. If your PHD2 (sorry…you did not actually say you were using PHD2)…but if your PHD2 profile has different set up nominated as your default…then SGP cannot start it…it can only try start what/how you have guiding set up in SGP. (As far as I am aware anyway). The two guide equipment profiles should match.
If you are sure it is not that…then I cannot think of anything else that might cause your problem.
again, i’m not as much concerned about the fact that guiding can’t be restarted (i know for a fact that the telescope is in the trees from the prior exposure, so there’s not much point in restarting the guiding), it’s the modal dialog that has the potential to stop the sequencer thread, prevent the telescope from being parked, and therefore let the telescope track into the pier that i’m worried about here.
my computer is attached to my OTA and is powered off under a tarp, so i can’t check this minute, but i will check if the profiles are the same in SGP and PHD2. having said that i have not changed anything in maybe a year, so this seems to me some issue with later builds of SGP as of course over the last year i’ve probably installed 10 new versions of SGP and never had this problem until recently.
