EKOS quirks?

[vineyard]

Hello,

Hope this finds everyone safe & well.  I managed to get two nights of playing done (Sat & Sun).  This time with my 4" TV102iis on the HEQ5Pro, with an Evoguide50.

Sat worked a treat, with the polar alignment, guiding & dithering working smoothly.  I set up a job scheduler, and found that the scheduler actually seems to loop infinitely. So I can set up a routine of taking 5 images of 120s with track, align & guide activated (I don't have automated focusing).  And the software dithers between each image, and every 5 images re-aligns (since my PA isn't perfect).  I did a quick eyeball of the data I gathered on Sat night, and its the sharpest I've ever managed to grab  I even managed to have a nap during the night!

Sun was more quirky shall we say.  First, during PA, the solver kept failing - I tried solving w the guide-camera & that worked.  And so I tweaked the binning to 1x1 on the main camera (it was 4x4 before) and the solver worked.  Hey ho, I can remember to keep an eye on that.  The dithering was much more temperamental though - every 2 or 3 images, it would fail to dither (the error message would be exposure failed) - it would keep taking the main image, and then start working again.  Does anyone know why this happens - I don't think I updated anything between Sat & Sun so why would the same kit suddenly do this?  The scheduler also seemed to not do its infinite loop which was annoying as I like the refreshed alignment.

(The other annoying thing was that on Sat I could use the kit remotely using Stellarmate on an RPi3, but on Sun the remote link suddenly cut out & wouldn't find it again (even though both devices were on the same wifi) - so I had to use a wired set-up.  Has that ever happened to anyone, and if so, any idea why - sitting wired is no good for my health - wife has banned me from doing that tonight!)).

Thank you for any tips - stay safe all,

Vin

[JamesF]

Are you using a local solver, or the remote astrometry.net one?

I found the remote one to be a bit unreliable, possibly because of my limited bandwidth, so switched to using a local install of astrometry.net (plus all the data files, which took quite a while to download) and it's been far more reliable since.

No ideas about the dithering though.  I'm only just starting to experiment with that myself.

James

[vineyard]

Thanks James.  I was using local offline (much prefer that too, and normally it works well - this is the first time I've experienced this binning difference during PA).  The dithering - when it works smoothly - is an automated treat!  I've been impressed by the guiding so far - I think it seems to stay within +/- 1 arcsec based on the drift diagram and the bullseye chart?

Cheers,

Vin

[JamesF]

The guiding does seem good.  I generally manage to get a total error of around 0.7" RMS and once it was around 0.5" RMS (on a stock NEQ6).  I don't get such good results if I use OpenPHD though.  That was generally claiming just over 1" RMS.  But in fact I only want to use that for comet tracking so even if it isn't as good it's not like I need to use it all the time.

James

[MarkAR]

I started tonight with EKOS giving me good focus, guiding around 0.8 RMS for the first set of subs (10 x 210s of red) then froze. Wouldn't change filter to go on the green and wouldn't take any subs. 

So its either very quirky or it's my laptop, new laptop tomorrow will hopefully solve my issues.

Sounds like EKOS is confusing itself and our computers.

[vineyard]

Argh, that'll have been frustrating about the filter Mark.  I've not been brave enough to try that level of complexity yet (sticking to current colour camera kit) - will wait to hear how you fare.  Good luck!

[MarkAR]

Cheers mate. Your loss of dithering might have been due to loss of the guide star but with the other issues I'm not sure.

I plate solve local which shows it's using ASTAP.