SGP - Losing guide Star when slewing to the next mosaic panel

I tried my second attempt at doing a mosaic on the Heart & Soul Nebula last night. I got all my frames
but here’s what happens:

On the first frame, SGP slews to the target and performs a succesfull plate solve. Then it will stop because PHD never selected another guide star. And before it aborts, I cancel the “Dismiss” and that pauses the sequence. I then go in to PHD2 (Dev Build 11) and re-select the guide star. Imaging commences for that frame.

The same thing happens on all suseqent mosaic frames. After a succesful Plate Solve, the guider won’t resume as the guide star from the previously manually selected guide star has moved. I then select another and the imaging continues. I took 6 X 2 Mosaic Panels this way.

Is there any way that when SGP’s Plates Solves are successfuly completed on each panel, that the next guide star is selected automatically? In PHD I used the hot key combination Alt/S (for PHD2 to auto select a guide star), but nothing happens. Otherwise it looks as if I have to pause the sequence after the Plate Solve routine, manually re-select a guide star, then carry on with the sequence again.

It appears that I’m almost there, I got all my panels but had to manually re-select a guide star before starting to image each of the next panels.

Thanks for any help…Clear Skies!
Randall

Have you tried autoselect guide star in PHD2?

Randall,

Could you post your logs? Thanks,

Chris

Hi Randall;

+1 for Auto Star Selection in PHD; this should solve your issue…

Best,

Lex

SGP already tells PhD to select a new star when targets change. It has to or features like multi targets and mosaics would be pretty worthless.

Sounds like PhD isn’t selecting a star for whatever reason. We’d need the SGP and PhD logs to see what is happening. Also make sure you’re using the latest Phd2 and SGP.

Thanks,
Jared

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Jared;

Good to know :sunglasses:

Best,

Lex

Hi Jared,

Thanks for the prompt reply and to the other members who have contributed.

I have attached the logs from the night of August 19/20, 2016. Please bear
in mind that the moon was still quite full and I don’t know if

that contributed to my problem. All I know is that after each move to the
next target in the mosiac (6 moves in total), I had to pause my

SGP sequence to “go in to PHD2” and manually, re-select the guide star as it
was out of the square in PHD2. Once I selected the star

I resumed SGP and was back in business. I was also aware that PHD2 has an
“Auto-Select Star” Alt/s menu item. I am not sure if

this was on or off and that it works in SGP’s Mosaic Wizard module or not.
I am using the latest versions of PHD2 (beta dev build 11)

and SGP. Hope these logs will help in finding an answer.

Many thanks again Jared

Randy

PHD2_DebugLog_2016-08-19_220049.txt (43 KB)

PHD2_DebugLog_2016-08-19_220230.txt (53.6 KB)

PHD2_GuideLog_2016-08-19_220501.txt (492 KB)

Hi Jared,

Thanks for the prompt reply and to the other members who have contributed.

I have attached the logs from the night of August 19/20, 2016. Please bear
in mind that the moon was still quite full and I don’t know if

that contributed to my problem. All I know is that after each move to the
next target in the mosiac (6 moves in total), I had to pause my

SGP sequence to “go in to PHD2” and manually, re-select the guide star as it
was out of the square in PHD2. Once I selected the star

I resumed SGP and was back in business. I was also aware that PHD2 has an
“Auto-Select Star” Alt/s menu item. I am not sure if

this was on or off and that it works in SGP’s Mosaic Wizard module or not.
I am using the latest versions of PHD2 (beta dev build 11)

and SGP. Hope these logs will help in finding an answer.

Many thanks again Jared

Randy

PHD2_GuideLog_2016-08-19_220501.txt (492 KB)

Jared,

I quickly checked the attached SGP log and now I remember getting this
warning at setup time:

{“Event”:“Alert”,“Timestamp”:1471670732.074,“Host”:“HP8470”,“Inst”:1,“Msg”:“
Calibration was too far from equator, recalibration is
needed.”,“Type”:“warning”} (from log)

My calibration star was too high. I chose it because it was near to my
target of the Heart and Soul nebulae which is very high (+60°). I thought it
might throw

out my guiding a tad but that would be all. Maybe it does affect the
automatic finding of the guide star?

Randy

Please see my next post on my attempted 6 panel Mosaic of the Heart & Soul nebulae. Nothing could be joined and gaps show up due to no overlaps.

Jared,

These images are so close to joining up. Could there be something in regards
to the overlap setting in the Mosaic Wizard not “holding” as specified.

EG: 20%.? Everything else looks good. The mount moved to the right
locations. There’s got to be something in “sizing-up” that overlay.

Randy

Not 100% sure what “holding” means, but the MFW code is fairly mature at this point and has not changed in a good long while. Lots of folks creating good mosaics with no issues. If the scale was wrong when the boxes were drawn, the overlap setting is fairly meaningless. Scale error is also capable of producing a situation where everything lines up correctly, but there are gaps between tiles.

Hi Ken,

What I mean by holding is if SGP looses the overlap setting somewhere along
the line. I kind of figure NO…but it’s a stab.

Is there anything in the SPG log I attached that might relate to my Mosaic
Wizard Settings?

Randy

Randy,
i posted in your other thread about why they’re not aligning properly:

Let’s try to keep these separate as they’re two different issues.

Thanks,
Jared

Yes, this was my problem Jared and thank you ever so much for explaining the angle of the camera in the Framing and Mosaic Wizard versus the physical orientation/angle of the camera on the dovetail of the mount. It all makes sense now and I am getting successful results thanks to your explanation.

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