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Old 13-01-2019, 09:56 AM
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The_bluester (Paul)
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The_bluester is offline
 
Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Kilmore, Australia
Posts: 3,342
Still ran in to a few issues last night, not aided at all by the wind which was so bad it made it tough to even use it as a testing night to work out what issues I have to work on.

First up, I have not got settings sorted yet (Which I am sure is all it is) to get APT reliably recognising a successful dither and continuing, PHD2 has dithered and resumed guiding but APT times out on the dither before continuing with the next sub, probably just more experimentation for me there.

The second one is related, I left it running in the hope I might get some data to play with today by aiming at a target it could point at without a flip for as many hours of dark I had left, hoping if the wind settled down I would get a few usable subs to practice processing on. The wind was so bad that PHD sometimes lost the guide star due to movement between guide images. If PHD had lost the star, instead of dithering and continuing after a timeout (Or success, I did get a couple that PAT recognised as successful) APT hangs instead, waiting for the dither and all that was reported for the next number of hours was PHD star lost. Typically, it did that about 20 minutes after I went to bed or I could have restarted the plan without dithering and taken pot luck on guiding.

I guess that comes down to two suggestions, both related. If PHD (Or whatever guide software) is reporting the guide star lost, can APT be set to periodically attempt to stop and restart guiding as it does after a Goto? That way if a big gust of wind or a clumsy oaf (Me) bumps it far enough to loose the guide star after a short period APT will try a restart on the guiding and hopefully PHD will pick a star and continue.


The second one would be for a hard timeout on dithering if PHD is reporting the star being lost or similar problem? I assume that one is related to requesting a dither when guiding is not actually active.
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