…I’ve got SGP set to use PHD2, dither, and settle at some arbitrary number (say, 1pix for 10s). I’ll see the dither happen, then the countdown as the guider settles for that time, but afterwards, will see “waiting for guider to report it is done settling…” – sometimes this is fairly quick (a few seconds), sometimes not (a minute or so) … but didn’t settling already happen?
I’ll upload my logs tomorrow when I can more easily access them … wasn’t sure though if there’s a setting in PHD2 or SGP I’m missing.
I think I found a big part of the problem – I was imaging the moon earlier, and didn’t change the tracking rate. I was wondering why my guiding was so poor. That said, I still do see the message “waiting for guider to report it is done settling” after SGP reports it is settled. Not sure it’s a problem, just wondering why the two messages – it’s as if SGP thinks it’s settled but PHD does not.
I did have another problem. I had several dark frames scheduled for around 4:50am. At 4:49, when my previous light frames were scheduled to end, I got a notification that SGP needed me to place the flat box. This was odd, because I had no flats scheduled. There were flats earlier, but I don’t think they were selected or if they were, they were completed.
Well in that case, there probably is not an issue here. SGPro does its own settling and times it. Then after this, we do a check with PHD2 to see if it is ready to resume guiding. If it’s not, we wait… When it is, we move on. So in reality, SGPro needs your guiding to be within some tolerance for some period of time AND PHD2 needs to agree that it is ready to go (done settling).
In reality, we would just remove the SGPro side of this settling process if PHD2 were the only auto guider we supported… but alas it is not. Because of this settling has to hurdle two gates.
From you description, it sounds like the alternate tracking rate was giving PHD2 some issues and sometimes it took longer to decide it was done settling (SGPro’s settling checks are a bit more simplistic than PHD2’s own internal checking I think). I did look through your logs and there were a few instances of this happening (long settling periods)… but I believe you have the answer to your issues at hand.
If you see this issue with normal tracking rates, we can dive deeper…
Excellent description, thanks! It definitely seems the lunar tracking was slowing PHDs settle time – I didn’t realize PHD did its own settling.
I can start another thread on the flat frame problem if you’d like, but I seem to remember hitting this way back – being prompted to place/remove flat box when no flats are in the sequence. Any ideas on this one?