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Well, I wish I had better news to report! Another frustrating night. Issues with TSX continue. It crashed running the ST-i, had trouble plate solving, and still has strange file opening issues. The St-i crash occured trying to take .1 sec exposures. It crashed after 3 min. I rebooted and was able to take 12 min of data at .5 sec exposures.
Josh, that link to Jonathan's post at SB was very good reading. Unfortunately it doesn't look like I made a mistake as best I can tell. But, tonight I decided to change camera, and use TSX rather than CCDSoft. I carefully positioned the ST-i to within 1 degrees from North, and plate solved it as .75 arcsec. I was careful to have the position angles as "zero" with the scope pointing West, the same side I collected data.
Anyway, my measure PE is 2.2 arcsec peak to peak. I saved the curve to the mount, enabled PEC and collected PE again. PE increased. Just to waste some more time I redid the curve with West checked, replaced the correction curve, re-measured PE and it was even worse (as expected!).
What I notice is that the rapid oscillation (pinion gear?) was smoothed out a lot, but that the gradual error remains and is increased. I don't get that. It seems to me that if one is fixed the other ought to be as well.
I'm not sure at all what to do next. If it's something obvious that I am doing wrong I just can't see it. Reaching for anything, could it be latency in my USB cables? I'm running active cables just a bit longer than the recommended length. Or maybe TSX is messed up?
Peter
PS Yes, I see that the plate solve I've posted says .74 arcsec. 5 previous solves rotating the camera all said .75 so maybe the focus shifted a tad? I can't see that as the issue.
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