PHD2 WON'T GUIDE AVX - ASCOM ERROR MESSAGE

[Scorpius]

This past Monday was the first truly clear night we’d had in ages so I set up all the gear in anticipation of a great night of imaging. But wouldn’t you know - when I started my first imaging run, PHD decided it couldn’t guide the mount. I’d never had any trouble like this before and couldn’t understand what was going on. Should have written them down but was getting error messages in PHD similar to “check pulse guiding” & “ASCOM driver failed”. So there I sat in complete frustration under some of the best skies I’ve seen since I started down the challenging road of amateur astrophotography about a year ago.

For hours, I tried uninstalling & re-installing the ASCOM camera drivers, the ASCOM platform and the Celestron ASCOM mount driver but to no avail so finally packed up all the gear around 4 am and tried to grab a couple hours sleep before time to go to work at 8. But before calling it a night, & while everything was still connected, I ran the ASCOM diagnostics and the log indicated there was one error found. For the next several days it was time to concentrate on work & other responsibilities but early this morning I couldn’t sleep - so made some coffee and decided to run the diagnostics again (this time with no equipment connected) and sure enough it found just one error according to the log. This made me feel somewhat better as it would seem to indicate a software problem rather than a hardware failure (the mount) since this time the diagnostics were using the ASCOM simulators because no equipment was connected to the laptop.

So in the interest of full disclosure here are my equipment/driver details:

Dell Laptop: OS - Windows 8.1 (64 bit) – Quad Core Intel i7 processor – 8GB Ram

Guiding Software: PHD2 (version 2.3.1)  http://openphdguiding.org/

ASCOM Platform: 6.1SP1 http://ascom-standards.org/

ASCOM Telescope/Mount Driver: Celestron Unified (6.0.5604) http://ascom-standards.org/Downloads/ScopeDrivers.htm

Mount: Celestron Advanced VX  http://www.celestron.com/browse-shop/astronomy/mounts-and-tripods/advanced-vx-mount

OTA: Explore Scientific 80mm ED APO Refractor  http://explorescientificusa.com/collections/ed-triplet-essential-series/products/80mm-apochromatic-refractor

Guide Cam and ASCOM driver (driver download link listed under product manuals): Orion SSAG Pro  http://www.telescope.com/Orion-StarShoot-AutoGuider-Pro-Mono-Astrophotography-Camera/p/106545.uts?keyword=ssag pro

OAG: Orion Thin OAG  http://www.telescope.com/catalog/search.cmd?form_state=searchForm&siteCode=US&keyword=Thin+OAG

Imaging Cam and ASCOM driver (driver download link listed under product manuals): Orion G3 Starshoot (mono)  http://www.telescope.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=101473

And here’s the error message as it appears in the ASCOM diagnostics log file:

03:09:51.889 Error                     Error List

03:09:51.889 Error                     AstroUtilTests - ##### NOT Matched - DeltaUT - Received: "False", Expected: "True"

03:09:51.889                          

03:09:51.889                          

03:09:51.889 Diagnostics  Completed function testing run: 1247 matches, 1 fail(s), 0 exception(s).

Does anyone know what the error message means and would it be logical to assume this is the cause of my guiding problem since I’ve never received any type of error message when running the ASCOM diagnostics before?

Thanks in advance for any advice or insight you can offer...

[Scorpius]

Forgot to mention another message PHD was returning intermittently on the night in question - "Guiding stopped - Scope started slewing". However the scope was not slewing and was actually doing a pretty good job of staying on target (M33) although not good enough to get usable unguided 5 min subs...