First Night with HEQ5 - Mistakes Were Made (Advice Required!)

[agthomson]

Hello all!

Again I turn to this forum for advice / wisdom. I've been imaging for a couple of years with a Star Adventurer and DSLR, moving on to a dedicated OSC at the end of last year. Being at the limit of the SA's capacity, I read up about the HEQ5 (or similar mounts) and began to learn the software in's and out's. So, I now have an HEQ5, my imaging scope, and a mini-guidescope. Everything is connected to my laptop (mount to hub of camera via EQDIR cable) and I control the telescope via EQMod. Guidecamera is connected via ST4 to the telescope, but I will change that going forward as it's a useless connection it seems.

First outdoor clear sky setup was last night. My general set-up was:

1. rough PA using polarscope
2. fine-tune PA using Sharpcap
3. fire up ASCOM Toolkit / EQMod and verify Lat, Long and Altitude settings
4. fire up StellariumScope & Stellarium
5. slew to bright star, move mount using EQMod, sync mount & stellarium (and repeat for another 1 or 2 stars)
6. slew to imaging target
7. fire up PHD2 and calibrate
8. guide
9. start imaging session in Sharpcap

First question - as you can see, during imaging I have Sharpcap, ASCOM Toolkit, EQMod, StellariumScope, Stellarium and PHD2 all open. Is there a package I can use to group these together? SGPro seems okay, but i'd need to keep Sharpcap to fine tune PA (although I can close once aligned). Is it worth getting rid of Stellarium and replacing it with CdC to remove one of the applications? I don't mind paying for a "premium" solution to all of this.

Second question - I cannot for the life of me get Sharpcap to plate solve, so when my mount and stellarium aren't in sync it can be a huge pain to tell what exactly i'm looking at and how to align the scope in EQMod. Is this common, or have I messed something up? A quick Google suggests it is very fiddly to set up, so might just find a more elegant solution.

Third question - with my PA almost perfect I started up PHD2 and it seemed to calibrate very well in 8 steps or something (I think). Started off guiding, and RA graph looks okay-ish. A bit peaky, but okay. I had upped the % applied and pulse length to 5000 for my Star Adventurer and didn't reduce this. Seemed to be okay with these, although I will likely reduce them. DEC graph was a total write-off with the default settings. Immediately went off the scale never to be seen again. Any idea what caused this, and how to avoid this? It caused noticeable trails even at 90s, so had to bin guiding. Scope seemed level from the bubble in the HEQ5 head, but I suppose it could be misleading.

 

[Singlin]

how did you do your rough PA?

Do you have a synscan handset?

[Starflyer]

ST4 can be flakey, it could have just been that the ST4 connections were playing up in Dec, or it could have been that your PA wasn't good. Either way, as you're using Eqmod / Ascom you should switch to pulse guiding sooner rather than later. 

Maybe you had Dec guiding set to North or South rather than Auto. This is fine as long as its set to the correct direction, but choose the wrong direction and it can lead to the problem you saw. 

The guide log and Debug log will help others troubleshoot this for you. Deciphering the log file is beyond me though. 

Hope you get it sorted soon. 

Ian

 

[agthomson]

36 minutes ago, Singlin said:

how did you do your rough PA?

Do you have a synscan handset?

PA through the polarscope in the mount. I generally get Polaris in roughly the right place in the reticle and then use SharpCap to fine tune. I find it easier than using the reticle for the final adjustments. I do confirm alignment through the polarscope afterwards. 

Yep, I have a handset. Would it be more beneficial than Eqmod? Seems more disconnected overall to me. 

 

6 minutes ago, Starflyer said:

ST4 can be flakey, it could have just been that the ST4 connections were playing up in Dec, or it could have been that your PA wasn't good. Either way, as you're using Eqmod / Ascom you should switch to pulse guiding sooner rather than later. 

Maybe you had Dec guiding set to North or South rather than Auto. This is fine as long as its set to the correct direction, but choose the wrong direction and it can lead to the problem you saw. 

The guide log and Debug log will help others troubleshoot this for you. Deciphering the log file is beyond me though. 

Hope you get it sorted soon. 

Ian

 

I am dumping ST4 as of now. One less cable on the mount I guess. Didn't even think to check what Dec was set up as, will add it to my list. I'll also have a look for the log file(s) and see if anything makes sense. 

Cheers! 

[Singlin]

I would do a" polar align" through this option in your handset and then see if the dec graph is better.

[jimjam11]

3 hours ago, agthomson said:

Hello all!

Again I turn to this forum for advice / wisdom. I've been imaging for a couple of years with a Star Adventurer and DSLR, moving on to a dedicated OSC at the end of last year. Being at the limit of the SA's capacity, I read up about the HEQ5 (or similar mounts) and began to learn the software in's and out's. So, I now have an HEQ5, my imaging scope, and a mini-guidescope. Everything is connected to my laptop (mount to hub of camera via EQDIR cable) and I control the telescope via EQMod. Guidecamera is connected via ST4 to the telescope, but I will change that going forward as it's a useless connection it seems.

First outdoor clear sky setup was last night. My general set-up was:

1. rough PA using polarscope
2. fine-tune PA using Sharpcap
3. fire up ASCOM Toolkit / EQMod and verify Lat, Long and Altitude settings
4. fire up StellariumScope & Stellarium
5. slew to bright star, move mount using EQMod, sync mount & stellarium (and repeat for another 1 or 2 stars)
6. slew to imaging target
7. fire up PHD2 and calibrate
8. guide
9. start imaging session in Sharpcap

First question - as you can see, during imaging I have Sharpcap, ASCOM Toolkit, EQMod, StellariumScope, Stellarium and PHD2 all open. Is there a package I can use to group these together? SGPro seems okay, but i'd need to keep Sharpcap to fine tune PA (although I can close once aligned). Is it worth getting rid of Stellarium and replacing it with CdC to remove one of the applications? I don't mind paying for a "premium" solution to all of this.

Second question - I cannot for the life of me get Sharpcap to plate solve, so when my mount and stellarium aren't in sync it can be a huge pain to tell what exactly i'm looking at and how to align the scope in EQMod. Is this common, or have I messed something up? A quick Google suggests it is very fiddly to set up, so might just find a more elegant solution.

Third question - with my PA almost perfect I started up PHD2 and it seemed to calibrate very well in 8 steps or something (I think). Started off guiding, and RA graph looks okay-ish. A bit peaky, but okay. I had upped the % applied and pulse length to 5000 for my Star Adventurer and didn't reduce this. Seemed to be okay with these, although I will likely reduce them. DEC graph was a total write-off with the default settings. Immediately went off the scale never to be seen again. Any idea what caused this, and how to avoid this? It caused noticeable trails even at 90s, so had to bin guiding. Scope seemed level from the bubble in the HEQ5 head, but I suppose it could be misleading.

 

1. Don’t bother with cdc or stellarium, I just use sgpro. It has a framing and mosaic wizard which gives you some visualisation when planning. Use Sharpcap for polar alignment and then close it. Sgpro can do everything from that point on.

2. Get plate solving working in sgpro, I never got Sharpcap working either. Once I have completed PA I slew to my target and ‘solve and sync blind’ which can take a minute or so. This updates the pointing model but critically it also sets your camera rotation which is then used as part of the cantering process as sgpro centres on your target. Rotation angle is part of your frame and focus setup.

3. Run the guiding assistant for at least 1 worm cycle (usually about 6mins) until you get familiar with your setup and alignment. It will recommend decent settings, note your dec drift direction (trendline on graph) and consider setting guiding to the opposite of this direction only.

[agthomson]

On 24/02/2019 at 20:59, jimjam11 said:

1. Don’t bother with cdc or stellarium, I just use sgpro. It has a framing and mosaic wizard which gives you some visualisation when planning. Use Sharpcap for polar alignment and then close it. Sgpro can do everything from that point on.

2. Get plate solving working in sgpro, I never got Sharpcap working either. Once I have completed PA I slew to my target and ‘solve and sync blind’ which can take a minute or so. This updates the pointing model but critically it also sets your camera rotation which is then used as part of the cantering process as sgpro centres on your target. Rotation angle is part of your frame and focus setup.

3. Run the guiding assistant for at least 1 worm cycle (usually about 6mins) until you get familiar with your setup and alignment. It will recommend decent settings, note your dec drift direction (trendline on graph) and consider setting guiding to the opposite of this direction only.

Thanks for the suggestion. I think i'll download the trial of SGPro and give it a chance.

I was also seriously considering an ASIAir when I bought the HEQ5 given all my equipment is ZWO or ASCOM compliant, but it lacks a few things I'd like to have. Not sure about the tablet interface as touchscreens are fiddly at best, as I'm finding with my Surface Pro. 

 

On 24/02/2019 at 19:18, Singlin said:

I would do a" polar align" through this option in your handset and then see if the dec graph is better.

I will give PA though the handset a chance as well. 

[Pompey Monkey]

53 minutes ago, agthomson said:

Thanks for the suggestion. I think i'll download the trial of SGPro and give it a chance.

I was also seriously considering an ASIAir when I bought the HEQ5 given all my equipment is ZWO or ASCOM compliant, but it lacks a few things I'd like to have. Not sure about the tablet interface as touchscreens are fiddly at best, as I'm finding with my Surface Pro. 

 

I will give PA though the handset a chance as well. 

If you are new to all this, I'd strongly recommend Astrophotography Tool (APT). It has a much, much, easier learning curve than SGP (I have both, BTW) and will do 95%+ of what you need to image seriously. It's so much easier to get the basics down with it.

FWIW, I'm not affiliated with any product, apart from what I do for a living, which has nowt to do with astronomy.

[agthomson]

[UPDATE]

Thanks everyone for their input in this, it has been very helpful.

I gave it all another go with my current equipment last night, swapping to pulse guiding as opposed to via ST4. I believe my issue with guiding might have been two-fold. Firstly DEC was set to only guide in either North or South (can't remember which), so I just set that to Auto. Swapping to pulse guiding meant a few more settings to play around with as the default values are useless. The guiding rate for whatever reason in EQMOD defaults to 0.1x and I had to quickly google to find more suitable values as calibration wouldn't detect enough movement. The second issue with guiding and star trailing was that EQMOD has "limits" on by default which meant the mount tracked for a while, hit a limit and then wasn't tracking in sidereal any more and guiding went bonkers. Oversight from my part, as i'm sure most of my problems are!

Guiding graphs didn't look great, but as i'm still playing around with pulse duration and aggressiveness I was happy enough. These will improve over time as I learn what does and doesn't work for my setup. Being able to get 5 minute subs and no trails with reasonable polar alignment is quite a big step for me, but as always with astrophotography, you solve one problem and several others appear! A quick 90mins of 5 min subs on the Pinwheel galaxy has revealed that I need to start dithering (I assume) to help remove the checkerboard effect on my final stacked and processed image. I've never imaged at that exposure length and low gain before (previous max was about 45-60s at maybe 200 gain). Also, dew! And light pollution.

For dithering, SharpCap seems terrible from what I can see / read as it looks like it needs to drop the next frame which would double the length of my imaging session. I'll need to check out SG Pro and APT in more detail to see which one fits my needs (level) the best. While i'm certainly a novice, as I'm not familiar with anything really maybe it's better to jump into SG Pro now as opposed to later? I don't know. Nighttime imaging n' astronomy (NINA) looks interesting but can't really tell if it's fully-featured.

I'll ask my other questions in new threads in the appropriate place.