Tracking issues with EQMOD via Ekos/KStars

[damienh]

Had a small window last night, but it didn't go to plan. Switched the setting from serial to ethernet and nothing broke immediately, so looked promising. Started the process of focusing the DSLR, as its the first time having iv attached and then everything crashed, think this was just due to Indi having a hiccup. Rebooted the Pi and the mount would fail to connect. Took me a while to realise it was due to switching to ethernet. Changed it back and connected again, but then the clouds came. Hoping tonight might be ok.

[dannybgoode]

4 hours ago, damienh said:

Had a small window last night, but it didn't go to plan. Switched the setting from serial to ethernet and nothing broke immediately, so looked promising. Started the process of focusing the DSLR, as its the first time having iv attached and then everything crashed, think this was just due to Indi having a hiccup. Rebooted the Pi and the mount would fail to connect. Took me a while to realise it was due to switching to ethernet. Changed it back and connected again, but then the clouds came. Hoping tonight might be ok.

Pretty much how 50% of my sessions go  . Get everything working, then everything breaks.  Repeat the exact same setup steps as the first time and it doesn't work.  Rinse, repeat and suddenly everything decides to work with you doing nothing different at all.  Clouds...

Hope you get it sorted.  I did manage to get a session in last night with my Sony RX10 as an experiment and it actually worked fine.  Went to try and run a Flats sequence this afternoon and it was not having any of it!

[AstroMuni]

On 14/03/2021 at 09:15, damienh said:

My process in ekos/KStars is as follows: 

1. Polar align the mount 
2. Add the telescope and boot up the Pi
3. Ensure location and time is correct
4. Connect and start up Indi and check everything is connected.
5. Unpark then mount and ensure tracking is on.
6. Within the align module, select capture and solve on Polaris, with slew to target selected. This typically takes about 3-4 iterations and then it completes. I have it set to 30 accuracy and settle 2000.
7. I then run capture and solve with sync selected. This is super quick.
8. As far as I can see the mount is tracking. I can see the RA and DE values changing. 
9. I then go to another target and repeat the process.
10. When I finally go to the capture module and start taking pictures, or view a live feed, I can see that the centred object starts to drift. If I leave it, within a minute or so the object is often completely out of view. I have to then run the align process again. I dont see any error or warning messages in the debug logs during this process to indicate any problems.

Hi, I use Ekos directly from laptop and the process I follow is similar to what you do but with a few differences:

In point 6 - I use the Polar alignment module to help get alignment and then I follow up by clicking on mount model and getting a few stars on either side of the meridien.

I then go to select an object and do a capture and solve. Then I start taking images with longer and longer durations to check if I have star images which are getting elongated.

[Ouroboros]

On 15/03/2021 at 13:47, dannybgoode said:

This should help

 

 

What an excellent video!  I have been polar aligning this way in KStars for some time but it’s good to see it explained so well. The producer of the video has several other good tutorial videos too. Good find!