Sequence generator Pro sounds fantastic - is it?

[Singlin]

Phew!!

I thought so but my Maths is so Cr.. that I thought that I might have missed something .

Thank you William.

[wuthton]

Phew!!

I thought so but my Maths is so Cr.. that I thought that I might have missed something .

Thank you William.

A little trial and error is your friend too.

You need it to produce a nice V shape graph. Adjust the step size and number of focus positions until you get a nice V.

If the step size is too small you'll get a U shape graph. If you've got too many positions the graph tends to plateau at either end.

[Barry-Wilson]

Singlin

I answered your question on the SGPro forum.  I hope you get sorted with AF - some experimentation is needed but I'm sure you'll crack it.  More than happy for you to PM if you get stuck.

Barry

[Merlin66]

Just a comment on focusing.

The critical focus zone (CFZ) where the image is within the Rayleigh limit (1/4 wave) is highly dependent on the telescope fRatio.

For a f8 the CFZ is 141 micron, f5 it's 55 micron and at f4 down to 35 micron.

If you can control the focuser position within this band your images will always be tight and in focus.

[Singlin]

Thank's everyone for the help.

I calculated my step size as being 9 after doing the maths.

I had a clear night two nights ago but with 90Kmh winds (just looked at the moon with clients)

Last night was only good for 30 minutes where I had promised clients to have a visual session.

As soon as it clears I will keep you posted.

Rgds

Simon

[johnrt]

Well what a miserable night I had with SGPro last night. Got home from work with a chance to capture a couple of hours before it got light, connected and started everything up and SGPRO refused to connect to the mount with EQMOD. Software freeze, reboot.

2nd time everything connected, slew, center, PHD2 calibrated but instead of starting to take subs SGPro decided it needed to meridian flip, despite the fact my mount was pointing at the right side of the sky, and the target had passed the meridian 1.5 hours ago. It did this twice, then crashed. Reboot again.

3rd time SGPro refused to connect to my atik 460ex properly and I couldn't control the cooler or download any frames from the camera, reboot again.

4th time SGPro refused to plate solve anything, just reported a failure the second it downloaded the image from the camera.

By this point I'd had enough, I'd lost half my imaging time fighting with SGPro and went to bed, annoyed.

[Phillyo]

Another vote for SGPro from me. I would also HIGHLY recommend the additional Framing and Mosaic addon, I think it's an extra £30 maybe? Incredibly useful and I wouldn't be without it. I bit the bullet and bought PinPoint and it's amazingly fast and accurate.

However, I agree with the above post. Sometimes it throws a bit of a wobbler for no reason...last night was one of those nights for me too. Tried to meridian flip for no reason...until I realised that my USB connector had worked itself loose and lost connection to the mount for a second so it thought it was pointing somewhere it wasn't. Ooops!

Phil

[Singlin]

How long does it take to get accepted on the Elbrus yahoo site in order to download all the files necessary for instal?

[Zakalwe]

How long does it take to get accepted on the Elbrus yahoo site in order to download all the files necessary for instal?

Dont do it this way!

Search on the SGP forum. I am sure that there's an automated installer for Elbrus.

Or use Astrometry.net. Again, there's an automated installer

[Phillyo]

Follow the instructions on Sgp to install elbrus

[frugal]

Well what a miserable night I had with SGPro last night. Got home from work with a chance to capture a couple of hours before it got light, connected and started everything up and SGPRO refused to connect to the mount with EQMOD. Software freeze, reboot.

2nd time everything connected, slew, center, PHD2 calibrated but instead of starting to take subs SGPro decided it needed to meridian flip, despite the fact my mount was pointing at the right side of the sky, and the target had passed the meridian 1.5 hours ago. It did this twice, then crashed. Reboot again.

3rd time SGPro refused to connect to my atik 460ex properly and I couldn't control the cooler or download any frames from the camera, reboot again.

4th time SGPro refused to plate solve anything, just reported a failure the second it downloaded the image from the camera.

I did not have quite as bad a night trying out SGPro for the first time, mainly because after a couple of hours I gave up and went back to BackyardEOS and AstroTortilla (which do not play well together but at least you can just click the Solve button again to make it retry).

My problems were that using the local astrometry.net server, it does not send the RA and DEC hints you give it, so every plate solve is a full sky plate solve... So I spent an hour or so refining the settings and the installed catalogs to get it down to 2-3 minutes to solve (slow laptop). The developers on the forum do look like they will be investigating this and might put it in a future version.

The gods of Wifi smiled upon me, so I tried to use the online nova.astrometry.net, but SGPro saves the file with one file name, and then tries to upload a completely different one to nova. This caused it to fail immediately (which might be the issue you were experiencing).

My next problem was that it does not keep the DSLR alive, from the time I connected it, to the time I wanted to start imaging (even for plate solving) the camera would go to sleep, which means that you need to turn the camera off and on again. Not great for unattended imaging.

I could have lived with these two issues, but the real killer was that something was killing my USB hub. I have the mount and the guide camera connected via a powered USB hub, and whilst centering the scope after the plate solves it would just crash. The centering would fail, I would check the ASCOM window and it would be displaying "No Port", and the guide camera was not updating frames. Unplug the USB hub, plug it back in again... Blue Screen of Death. I can not for the life of me figure out what SGPro could be doing to cause this, it is just issuing commands to ASCOM, it isn't talking to the USB ports directly at all, but I managed to repeat the problem three times in a row.

I would have said it was a problem with the USB hub only, however when I went back to using Backyard EOS and Astrotortilla the hub worked flawlessly for 6 hours with AT and Carte de Ciel issuing slew commands to ASCOM, and it was all still working fine when I got up and packed it away this morning.

[mhard26339]

On 2/27/2015 at 16:23, frugal said:

I did not have quite as bad a night trying out SGPro for the first time, mainly because after a couple of hours I gave up and went back to BackyardEOS and AstroTortilla (which do not play well together but at least you can just click the Solve button again to make it retry).

My problems were that using the local astrometry.net server, it does not send the RA and DEC hints you give it, so every plate solve is a full sky plate solve... So I spent an hour or so refining the settings and the installed catalogs to get it down to 2-3 minutes to solve (slow laptop). The developers on the forum do look like they will be investigating this and might put it in a future version.

The gods of Wifi smiled upon me, so I tried to use the online nova.astrometry.net, but SGPro saves the file with one file name, and then tries to upload a completely different one to nova. This caused it to fail immediately (which might be the issue you were experiencing).

My next problem was that it does not keep the DSLR alive, from the time I connected it, to the time I wanted to start imaging (even for plate solving) the camera would go to sleep, which means that you need to turn the camera off and on again. Not great for unattended imaging.

I could have lived with these two issues, but the real killer was that something was killing my USB hub. I have the mount and the guide camera connected via a powered USB hub, and whilst centering the scope after the plate solves it would just crash. The centering would fail, I would check the ASCOM window and it would be displaying "No Port", and the guide camera was not updating frames. Unplug the USB hub, plug it back in again... Blue Screen of Death. I can not for the life of me figure out what SGPro could be doing to cause this, it is just issuing commands to ASCOM, it isn't talking to the USB ports directly at all, but I managed to repeat the problem three times in a row.

I would have said it was a problem with the USB hub only, however when I went back to using Backyard EOS and Astrotortilla the hub worked flawlessly for 6 hours with AT and Carte de Ciel issuing slew commands to ASCOM, and it was all still working fine when I got up and packed it away this morning.

 

I must admit Frugal I was getting tempted to give this a go following some of the reviews and comments from a local buddy of mine but after the last 2 comments I think I will stick to my Maxim and focusmax etc which is working just fine. I operate remotely and have had enough frustration and do not want to start all over again. I will leave it for a while, monitor the blogs, possibly view a couple of sessions with my buddy and see what revisions come out! 

Regards and thanks to all

Mike

[Xplode]

On 29.1.2017 at 11:44, mhard26339 said:

 

I must admit Frugal I was getting tempted to give this a go following some of the reviews and comments from a local buddy of mine but after the last 2 comments I think I will stick to my Maxim and focusmax etc which is working just fine. I operate remotely and have had enough frustration and do not want to start all over again. I will leave it for a while, monitor the blogs, possibly view a couple of sessions with my buddy and see what revisions come out! 

Regards and thanks to all

Mike

You are basing this on old comments and even user error.

The setting for keeping the camera alive is on the camera, not in the software (user error)

Today plate solving in SGP is great, it uses Platesolve2 which is both fast and easy to setup. As long as settings for scale is right and the mount is pointing in the general direction of where you're trying to plate solve it's very fast.

 

SGP is updated with new features all the time and bugs are fixed very fast, i suggest you try it and if you need help with something check out their forum for answers.