Was going great, then disaster

[fluffy]

Over the last few weeks, i've been testing out my gear, 150P-DS and Canon 600D, on HEQ5 syntrek (with eqdir), 10 x 50 finderscope with QHY5 camera for guiding, all connected to netbook. Eventually got eveything working, so tonight I thought I'd do a good hours worth of imaging on M101.

First snag was with Cartes du Ciel. Start it up, connect to scope, and the guide mark says its pointing to polaris, fine. Manually move scope to point to Mizar, and try and sync, nothing happens... ecentually by pointing to other stars and trying to sync, I eventually can get it to sync on Alkaid... fine, so move to scope to Alkaid, and slew to Mizar to check I have the right star selected, great, so slew to M101, then guide mark jumps back to polaris, so stop, leave it for a while and it returns to where it should be... eventually I get M101 in view, take a 2 minute exposure, play around with brightness, yes I have it in view Great. Start guidescope calibration, good thats working... then accidently shutdown Cartes Du Ciel... NOOOOOO, start it back up, connect to scope and track... hmmm, something not right, I can see stars moving in PHD (which was still runing), then accidentally close phd down, so of course once started up again it wants to calibrate... so gave up for the night.

But, any reason why i'm having trouble getting Cartes du Ciel to sync. Switch limits off in eqmod, but it wont sync on certain stars.

[chrisshillito]

EQMOD can reject syncs if the position error you've corrected is particularly large (ususally caused by not power cycling wen not parked or in the home position) - if its doing that there will be a message on the message center display.

Also, if your pulse guiding with PHD make sure the instances of EQMOD aren't being started - this can happen if PHD, EQMOD and CDC have been set to run with different rights - set them all to run as administrator.

You could open up tthe ASCOM monitor in EQMOD at check if the sync is actually being received.

Chris.

[fluffy]

Part 2, Doh.

Getting to grips with everything quite nicely. Can work around the cartes du ciel issue. Think it's a meridian issue, so will slew to where I want to go then adjust the scope so it's pointing where it should.

Anyway, got it all working, took a few shots to make sure I was pointing at the right place, great. So decided to take a dark before I setup a run. Half way through the run guiding failed, and I realised battery issue. Good job it did fail as I had forgotten to take the cap of the end of the scope... Oh how I laughed.

[Scott]

Part 2, Doh.

Getting to grips with everything quite nicely. Can work around the cartes du ciel issue. Think it's a meridian issue, so will slew to where I want to go then adjust the scope so it's pointing where it should.

Anyway, got it all working, took a few shots to make sure I was pointing at the right place, great. So decided to take a dark before I setup a run. Half way through the run guiding failed, and I realised battery issue. Good job it did fail as I had forgotten to take the cap of the end of the scope... Oh how I laughed.

That's the problem when the weather is so pants......everything you learn in one session is forgotten by the next. another thing to keep an eye on..... when restarting various software, make sure that eqmod is tracking... simple but easily overlooked