Start Capturing at: Last night I had the sequencing to start at 7:00pm to begin capturing IC410. When I returned to the Observatory I found the sequencing had not started at 7:00, but was “ready”. I pressed the Run Sequence button and then the process started (around 9:00pm).
Upon reflection, I suspect that after setting the “start capturing at” time (in this case 7:00pm), I then must push the Run Sequence button right away. Then the process will start when 7:00 rolls around.
Is this correct?
Guide Star Settle at: Soon after beginning to use SGPro, I increased the pixel settle at to 0.7. That helped the program keep going, but recently the failure to settle has become more chronic, resulting in aborts.
I have recently bumped that value to 0.8 and found that change to be of little help. As I watch the PHD graph I see the normal Dec and RA swings to generally be quite a bit greater than 0.8. So I’m wondering what is the down side of raising this value to a higher value, but one that still falls below the extremes of the guiding variation?
Included are screen shot of IC410 Target Settings, PHD2’s log file and SGPro’s log file.
I’d need to know you guider and imager scale to truly answer this. However as long as your settle sampling is lower than your imager scale then you’re probably ok. For instance if your imager scale is 2 arcsec/pix and your guider is 1 arcsec/pix then you’re find settling when your guider is below 2 pixels as it will be below your imager scale.
I typically settle around 1 pixel as I’m guiding through an OAG (so same focal length) but my guider has smaller pixels than my imager so it has a lower pixel sampling value.
I’ve just got through setting up again. And I see that the Sequence must be pushed prior to the delayed start. Makes sense now.
I appreciate your comments on the settling question. I will try to take advantage of some wiggle room and see if I can’t find a more robust setting. Tonight I’ve bumped the "settle at"value to 1.0, and will see how well that does. And I believe it can be set even higher without deteriorating the quality of the image.
Just one more observation. I had wondered whether “out of focus” would be a problem when doing a delayed start. I see where you have added more capability in the autofocus. And that seems to work well.
Raising the “settle at” value from 0.7 to 1.0 got me through the night. So that appears to be at least one solution.
There was a new problem which I discuss in “Imaging malfunction towards early morning”. This one looks like it is unrelated to the issues in this post.