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Amazing night for the Bubble, but PHD2 woes ...


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Hello fellow stargazers

Last night was a wonderful, crisp clear evening. A perfect evening for imaging :)

I set up in a hurry and ran into some issues trying to get my focus right on my Mak.

It has a narrow focus point and a wide range, so tricky to get focus.

Finally I got my focus, and tried to get AstroTortilla to solve and it was being very painful.

Once I finally got it to plate solve, by increasing the search radius to 100.

I then framed my image and set up PHD2  to start guiding.

It proceeded to hang during config stage. I had to crash out the application then restart it.

Finally I got the guiding to run, and after about 7min of guiding, again the program hangs.

After a final restart I get the guiding to run and wait for about 20 min.

All finally working (after about 2 hours) I go to bed as its a work night and I have 5 hours of data to download.

2014-10-21_C11%2BBiubble%2BNGC7635_ISO16

When I woke up this morning, I found 50 subs waiting for me and I was so exited!

But then as I worked through them to my utter disbelief, I found that only the first 20min of data is useable (above)

PHD had crashed again and all 5 hours of subs have got big blurry stars ...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

With over a month of horrible weather, to finally have such a beautiful night,be ruined!

Oh well, this sport is all about perseverance, so I am uninstalling my QHY5 drivers and PHD2

I will resintall them and test them to see if I can resolve the problem.

Anybody else have problems with PHD2 stability?

Oh and what you think of the image, not too bad for 20min, but I was really hoping for better.

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Your not the only one Chris.......it was the best night in a while apart for footie floodlights for 2hours.

6 hours wasted on new scope problems, only consolation, it did allow me to fettle my PA with PHD.

Think the EF 200mm L  or the Sigma 105 is going back on the mount until solved.

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Yes- I have had similar issues using PHD2. Basically it doesn't work on my Win 64 bit machine in my obsy. The guiding is erratic and I have trouble locking onto a guidestar.

PHD1 how ever. Know problems at all.

My advice is, use PHD 1.

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I don't want to start a flame war, love PHD it completely revolutionised my imaging.

I used to use phd1 to great success and it was buggy, which is why I gladly switched to phd2 some time ago.

I must admit when it works it is awesome, but so many bugs. For instance try resizing the window while guiding. I do think some of my woes are due to sloppy qhy drivers, they are just nasty and can even take down a OS.

I am on xp sp3 inside a virtual machine. I changed host laptops and ever since the change PHD2 hates me :(

(Or is it those pesky drivers)

I will reinstall latest camera drivers and latest version of phd2 again to trouble shoot.

@mike Sorry to hear, but it does give me some comfort to hear I did not suffer alone.

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Phd2 is very buggy compared to phd1 on my OS X Mavericks platform. It used to crash about 3 times per night. I've corresponded with the support group and sent log files so hopefully it's getting resolved. I note they have moved from version c to k very quickly recently. I managed to stabilise it by making sure it's guiding BEFORE I run my capture software. This seems to work better on my platform. Otherwise I'm happy with it, but then I'm about to download Yosemite...........

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PHD2 has been working fine for me on OSX Mavericks with my asi120mm.

It also works ok on Windows XP in a VMWARE on the same machine, I mainly use it in OSX though as the windows desktop gets too cluttered.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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i feel your pain, it's so frustrating when it goes wrong.

I've not had any problems with PHD2, on an old Windows XP laptop.  I've seen your windows resize bug before though, i get either fullscreen or really really small.

Try asking on the developers forum though, with a log file - I've found them very responsive and helpful.

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did you manage to resolve your crashing PHD2 issues btw ?

I had a couple of crashes the other night.  Both times during guiding, the screen just froze unresponsive and I had to kill it from the task manager - Windows XP.

Also had a weird one, the first calibration was uneventful, about 15 steps in each direction, W, E, N and S and happily guiding after that.  However, after it had crashed and restarted the Dec calibration was very strange, it took about 50 steps N and S and seemed to be in the same direction as the RA calibrations.  After scratching my head for a while, I noticed that the RA and Dec errors were very similar to each other everywhere on the graph, the scatter plot showed high correlation between RA and Dec, and when doing the overlay of RA/Dec onto the camera view, they were nearly parallel to each other, far from orthogonal (I know it's not going to be 90 degrees orthogonal, but this was more like 10 degrees)

My theory is that after the first crash, PHD could no longer send Dec guidepulses, maybe because the first Ascom Interface instance was still running or something, so it misinterpreted small periodic-error and polar-misalign drifts as being genuine moves and gave a bogus Dec calibration.

Anyway, that, coupled with high cirrus which gradually thickened over the session, and I think I'll be lucky if I can rescue anything.

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Hmmm, yes I have resolved the PhD crashes. I think it was due to using a old usb1 port on my laptop, I have subsequently started using my usb2 port for guiding and the old port for my eos.

Holding thumbs that this will solve first tests seem positive.

Only thing I can suggest is that you kill eqmod after a PhD crash. This sucks as it will loose alignment. So best to park save alignment and restart then load alignment.

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Actually the guys on the PHD forum were really helpful on this, here - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/open-phd-guiding/XwJ4DoYQsk8

Seems it was a communication problem with my camera - cable or USB port (i suspect my cable), and also later versions of PHD should be able to deal with it without hanging, fixed in 2.3.1j I think.

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