Power outage, guiding dead?

[ollypenrice]

Last night at around 3.00 am we had a momentary dip in power (lights dimmed for less than a second.) Tom and I were running two rigs, one guiding in PHD2 and the other in Astro Art 5, one in XP and one in Win7. The CCD cameras all fell over but restarted happily on rebooting so all cameras, including both guide cams, took pictures happily. BUT neither would guide. The guide trace simply shot off the scale immediately. PHD would not recalibrate.  Mounts are Mesu and Avalon.

Has anyone seen this before? I haven't. And does anyone have a suggestion? We would prefer to see what we can do today rather wait for a guide star at night to try to sort it. I'm minded to uninstall and re-install the guiding software.

Olly

[PhotoGav]

Olly, that sounds very frustrating. I haven't experienced your exact circumstances, but did have an 'off the scale guiding' issue last year. All kit appeared to be working normally, yet guiding just didn't work. I narrowed the issue down to a faulty connection in the guide cam st4 cable port by moving the mount manually from within PHD2. It was soon apparent that the South direction didn't work. I don't know if this might be a route to a solution for you? It seems a tad unlikely that both mounts have suddenly blown a connection, but it's all I can suggest. Good luck.

[mikeyscope]

Hi Olly

Perhaps run ASCOM diagnostics to check everything communicating??

Mike

[ChrisLX200]

This is one of those situations where anything could have happened - corrupted file on the HD for example. Run a CHKDSK for starters. If it's still playing silly.. persons, then I reach for my backup and restore a recent disk image. Often quicker to do that than it is to trouble-shoot what broke.

ChrisH

[steppenwolf]

Hi Olly,

Have you resolved the issues?

Assuming for now that you haven't,  you say that PHD would not calibrate but what about AA5 would that calibrate OK? For two disparate systems to go down apparently with the same issue after a power outage is nuts so I think they should be investigated totally separately.

 

[chrisp]

Did you fix this? Would be interesting to hear what it was and how much hair you lost

 

[Tim]

@ollypenrice  We are all waiting with bated breath

[ollypenrice]

Sorry to be slow. Yes, I did get it all going again but can't be dead sure what I did to fix it! I think it was rebooting the mounts (though we did that at the time as well.) All of a sudden everything was back to normal next time out. Thanks for the tips, which I'll remember for another time.

I don't know what is the role of a 'rest period' in IT. A couple of times a year my EFW2 filterwheel will not be recognized despite various power-cycling attempts. Without fail, though, it will work in the morning. This has been going on for years and I'm none the wiser...

Olly