CrashEd

The question is whether the 12V has done any damage further downstream of the regulators. Hopefully you've been lucky...

If you are desperate, and there are any long-haired folk in your family, then a hair band works great too (the type without the metal crimp on it 😉) 👌

The IC in the bottom image definitely looks as though it has let go of the magic smoke! 😉 It's hard to track down surface mount ICs from the print on the package, but if you haven't tried already then you might have better luck searching for the schematic for the board rather than the part no. At best you'll get the part number, at worst you could find something that will perform the same task.

Well, that's one way of fixing it! 😁

There's a option in the settings that allows the software to prompt for stable, beta or nightly updates. Maybe switch to stable or beta if you want stability.

Last night I tried adding to my dark library using SGP by just having my camera and filter wheel attached to my laptop. It was such a hassle messing around with my (proven) profile to stop it complaining that I didn’t have my mount etc attached. I gave up and switched over to NINA and it took 2 seconds - it is very intuitive. I now do everything in there. I don’t think I’ll go back to SGP now as it’s too inflexible. It’s also quite slow, so NINA is saving me valuable imaging time (or giving me more time to collect data). It’s well worth a try.

I tried the parabolic fit the other night but it was before I had it all dialled in, so I'll give it a go next time I'm out. Which 1.10 nightly version are oyu finding the mose stable?

Had another great night using NINA last night. Think I've finally cracked the autofocus, although it's taken a bit of setting up. I'm still not getting a classic 'V' profile but it's close enough. It's hitting the focal point better now in any a case. The only real issue now is that I'm still getting the odd camera error (ASI1600mm Pro). I'll try and post a log on their Discord channel. This time it was during the autofocus routine and luckily not during imaging. Great bit of software though!

Thanks guys - I was using the latest version (1.9 and the latest nightly), so maybe I'll try reverting to the one you mentioned just in case something got bugged in that version. There was definitely something wrong with the stretch. I'll persevere though as it's a great bit of software!

Took NINA out for a spin last night (that sounds wrong! 😆) and I have to say, I was very impressed. I found it more intuitive to use that SGP and the download speed with my ASI1600mm Pro is incredible in comparison! It will seriously same some time over SGP. Plate solving with ASTAP was also much faster than Platesolve2. I managed to get through a whole imaging session with only a few hiccups: Autofocus was slightly out (50 steps) compared to what I could achieve manually, although I did realise (too late) that I didn't have the binning set to 2x2 as I would normally in SGP. This meant that there weren't enough stars for analysis. I think you can change the sensitivity of the star detection, so I'll try that as well. This leads on to the autostretch issue in # 2 below... I found the main image display to be pretty awful in terms of the stretch that was performed. It was pretty hard to distinguish the target, other than by some brighter stars. In fact the image history images were better. Not sure if this is a bug (I was using last night's nightly download). I tried messing with the black clipping setting and the stretch value, but to no avail. This could be why the autofocus struggled too? I through a few images into SGP to compare and the stretch was much better. I got a couple of camera download errors, which meant a few dropped frames throughout the session. I'm using the native driver for the ASI1600mm Pro, so I might revert to the ASCOM driver next time. So, some tweaking required here and there, but otherwise I'm converted!! 😀

Hi Woodsie, did you find a solution to this? I’m having similar issues in Ekos with my focuser. Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers - many thanks!

Thanks for the SCT information - really helpful. Could you PM me acopy of the article or a link? Had a look for it earlier buy couldn't find it online. Maybe I'll need to order the back-issue? Apologies for the minor 'star-hop' guys. Back on topic now, I promise

Many thanks for posting that Susaron - valuable information. It seems to tick all the boxes for me as I intend to use it for visual work with my SCT in AZ mode and to begin imaging with a 130pds in EQ mode. Without sidetracking the original thread, how does it handle the 200pds and is it possible to image with it?

Is anyone using the AZ EQ5-GT mount with the 130pds? I'm thinking of getting one (and a 130) to do some AP. Specs are similar to the HEQ5, so presimably it should be ok?