JSeaman

Thanks - Would you believe it, it is actually 11mm out from the 55mm spacing! I had double counted the ASI1600 black spacer in my calcs I had verbose logs on but something went wrong because it was just an empty file. I'm going to tell it to do a scheduled park tonight and watch what it does this time. I'm wondering if running a picture schedule before the overall schedule is causing it

Are you happy to upload the pictures? I did exactly what you described this morning in photoshop

I have been working on this over 2 nights to prove out a couple of things. I have a coma corrector now but my spacing is obviously wrong, a 10mm spacer is on order to address this. I have managed to get Ekos working but with a few gotchas: The auto focus routine, when checked with a Bahtinov, was not achieving good focus so I am doing this manually for now The mount didn't keep a log last night and didn't park again, no idea why The auto focus routine sometimes gets into a loop where it says it isn't doing anything but it actually is, very hard to fight it too, I ended up shutting down the Indi server to recover it On the plus side though: Local plate solving and correction is amazing, this alone makes Ekos/KStars worthwhile for me The guiding is so much quicker to set up than PHD2, I have spent months tweaking settings to make this scope get somewhere near acceptable and Ekos just works (within seconds) I took a picture for the first time in ages! I don't think this would be considered a good M13 but it is progress at least Best 98% of 97 red, 113 green, 113 blue, 49x5 second luminance and 46x30 second luminance 15 bias, 20 darks, 50 flats for each filter

I don't think it's slip, if the clutch holds I'd leave it alone From the graphs Dec is definitely drifting and quite a lot, definitely worth looking at polar alignment again

Thanks Wim, with the Dec drifting so much then alignment should be checked too I think

Oh and your last log at 1:25 is interesting, no corrections being made and you get the RA runaway but it stops at about 20 arc seconds:

For the guiding, PHD has calculated 6.45 arc second per pixel, the calc is 206 x (3.8 u pixel size on the ASI 120 / 120mm Asi 30F4) For imagine, your APO has a 360mm focal length and it looks like a 4.3 u pixel size I think for the T3i which gives 206x(4.3/360) = 2.48 arc seconds per pixel If we assume the guide scale should be no more than 4 times the size of the imaging scale then it should be OK You are generally getting about +/- 5 arc seconds when the guiding is behaving Note on the log at midnight, your corrections do pull it back in: I would suggest increasing the maximum pulse beyond 2000mS to see if this is repeatable recovery It seems you have no guiding in DEC: Calibration step = phdlab_placeholder, Max RA duration = 2000, Max DEC duration = 2000, DEC guide mode = Off Cal in RA only: This results in a continual drift in dec and it is 10s of arc seconds: Note also the pulses (bar graph bit) on the right hand side at the 2000mS limit, PHD is trying to correct but unable to make the mount behave. I would be checking how freely the mount moves and balance of equipment

I have only found a couple of quirks - setting a specific position to move the lakeside focuser occasionally caused it to kill the focus driver until I switched the Pi off and on again, then it went back to normal. Happened a couple of times but hopefully not a problem in normal (auto focus) operation I had one failed park which I haven't been able to reproduce Everything else has worked well, a little clunky in places and I'd like to be able to cool the CCD as part of the schedule but otherwise it seems OK. For me the benefits of a single piece of software which has reliable USB outweight the nuances but there are some opportunities to improve I agree. I haven't tried a DSLR but certainly didn't have the sort of failures on the ZWO equipment, the 120 and 1600 have been rock steady. I have so far had no issues that would prevent me imaging on a normal night

Fantastic, really glad it's helped you. Last night I ran the rig up and it behaved perfectly. There are things that could be improved but there is some incredible functionality for a free OS/software package, good luck!

Would he be OK with a simple mono camera like this? https://www.rothervalleyoptics.co.uk/zwo-asi120mm-mini-monochrome-small-format-13-cmos-usb-20-camera.html

Would he be OK with a simple mono camera like this? https://www.rothervalleyoptics.co.uk/zwo-asi120mm-mini-monochrome-small-format-13-cmos-usb-20-camera.html

OK one to watch, hopefully the additional logging will help if it reoccurs but I haven't been able to make it today

No I had already done that following your comment so it's something else

I had my first go at running a full schedule last night, I managed to unpark, slew, focus, plate solve, guide, image and shutdown perfectly. The second time I did it, the mount didn't park properly but everything else worked. I'll need to re-set the home position and I have enabled verbose logging to file and just downloading the latest updates to see if I can reproduce it

That's interesting, the data certainly persisted on my set up (I checked with the roof off before trying again!!) but thanks anyway

OK so that's it, it went from being a "yay it works" thread to more of a how to but hope it helps, I'm pretty pleased with everything currently, hopefully I'll feel the same with a few years of astro work under my belt!

Guiding This worried me the most, I have lost more time than I care to think tweaking PHD, changing parameters, playing with different algorithms, calibrating for minutes at a time etc. With this, I ticked autostar and pressed guide, within seconds it was guiding. Absolutely amazed by how well this all hangs together

Focusing This was a really pleasant surprise after having to go in and out with a Bahtinov mask for the last couple of years, Ekos will control your guide CCD (ZWO ASI 120mm mini for me) and your focuser (Lakeside in my case) to achieve focus. You can manually move things around or set the position but just hit auto focus without setting anything up and it achieves perfect focus (verified with my trusty Bahtinov afterwards)

Shutdown Script I wanted to turn the Pi off automatically at the end of my session, to do this you can run a script. You can do this a number of ways but my approach was to right click on the desktop and choose new file: Type in a name ending with .sh (Unix SHell file extension for bash scripts), I called mine Shutdown.sh Enter 3 lines: #!/bin/bash shutdown now exit 0 The first line tells the interpreter it is a bash script, the second one switches off the pi without a password prompt and the third line just returns a success code for running the script. The last thing to do is right click on the file and choose properties then give execute permissions to anyone Your shutdown procedure shown in the previous section can then just point at this script to fully switch things off and look after that SD card before you pull power

Schedule There is also an over-arching scheduler which lets you control the whole astro session. This handles everything from unparking the scope through to shutting things down and you also call a Sequence as set up previously for taking the images You will notice there are 4 Steps shown on the top left which are: 1. Track – goes to the target which you select using the “Target” box 2. Focus – will automatically focus on a star for you 3. Align – Plate solves and moves to accommodate any positional errors 4. Guide – Guess what that does?! This is all so easy and works really well

Picture Sequence Similar to APT and other tools, you can set up a sequence of photos to take using different settings, filters etc. Click the camera button and choose the right CCD from the list highlighted below. Then enter any settings e.g. 50 pictures of 600 seconds then press “+” to add it to the sequence Save the sequence using the button on the right

Custom Home Position Like most astro mount controller software, it expects the mount to be at 0/0 for RA/Dec on power up. I use a custom park position so started up in the traditional “Home” position of 0/0 and then moved the mount as follows: Click on the mount icon On the right hand side you will see the mount control button: If you are familiar with EQMod then this is a similar interface, if you’re not it’s fairly self explanatory, press the buttons and move the mount around. You will need to unpark it first and you might want to drag the slider to the right so you can slew around quickly Once you have found your new home position, pop back to the Indi panel and choose Site Management then press the Set button shown below

Indi Control Panel Once you have a profile set up, click the play button mentioned above and the control panel will appear with all your stuff: You can delve into all the menus and find dozens of settings you never knew about. The interface is such that the bold white text on a button is the selected state e.g. above, the connection is live and you can click the button marked “Disconnect” to drop it

I’m still finding my way around but I have done the following so far: Set up a Profile You can add different profiles for different kit configurations easily from the Ekos window I only have one profile which is where I list all my gear. I selected the following for my ASI ZWO 120mm guide scope, ASI ZWO 1600mm camera, NEQ6 Pro Mount and Lakeside Focuser (note I chose for it to autoconnect and guide using KStars directly which is way easier than PHD to set up initially!)

Then you enter the world of Ekos which allows you to bring in all your hardware, simply click the button shown below (of click tools then Ekos or press CTRL+K): Just like KStars there are a couple of set up steps, first a general intro (hit next) Then go for Equipment attached to the device (unless you run it as a remote server, I know some people had latency issues so I ran on the pi outside mounted on the scope) It finds all your stuff and all worked seamlessly for me. From here on in, you just click the play button to connect everything Ekos uses the INDI which is described in detail here, it is a pretty neat approach and works well You can download the source code for both Kstars and Indi which is pretty nice, both open source projects on github.