PHD2 guiding but not reporting RMS error in RA and DEC

[Hughsie]

I have recently switched to using an OAG with an RC8 and prior to this had no issues guiding with SGPro and PHD2 with a guide camera and guide scope.

The issue I have is this;

I commence my imaging sequence, the scope slews to target, plate solves and then starts PHD2.

PHD2 opens up and connects to my guide camera and SGPro awaits guiding to commence.

Meanwhile PHD2 cycles through 3.5 s images, auto selects a star and commences guiding. RA OSC is reported but RA and DEC errors remain at zero. The RA and DEC trend lines continue as you would expect and PHD2 is making adjustments.

Back to SGPro, it is still waiting for auto guiding to start and hence the image run doesn’t commence.

I have reasonable focus on my guide camera and there is a dark library in place for my guide camera. SNR on the guide star is good.

Has anyone experienced this before and if so, what adjustments did you make to correct it.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

John

 

[michael8554]

Are you using the latest PHD2 dev version ?

Then sounds like a bug, upload the Guide and Debug logs to the PHD2 forum.

(Upload instructions in the Help menu)

Michael

Edited April 13, 2021 by michael8554

[Hughsie]

Hi Michael.

I was on a dev version of PHD2 and reloaded a previous version (before the multi star).

Previously I was guiding with a ZWO ASI290mm mini which was producing a pixel resolution of 0.49. Fortunately I have a Starlight Express Lodestar X2. With this plumbed into the imaging rig and with a pixel size of 8.3 the resolution stepped up to 1’. Now I have no guiding issues.

[michael8554]

That's good to hear.

So how did the swap to LodeStar make the PHD2 errors appear ?

Michael

[Hughsie]

On 14/04/2021 at 09:50, michael8554 said:

That's good to hear.

So how did the swap to LodeStar make the PHD2 errors appear ?

Michael

No idea Michael. I have since used the ASI290mm mini with my WOZ103 and had no issues at all so I can assume the guide camera is in working order. 

I made two adjustments, first switched out the 290 for the Lodestar which is a more sensitive camera and the second was I increased the ’auto guider’ settle settings from 0.5 px to 1 px and all is working.

TBH I have been getting frustrated with SGPro recently. It seems with the latest version its a bit of a lottery each time I image as to what will fail for no obvious reason and only a few days ago it simply failed to open on my laptop when a week before it worked fine and nothing had changed in-between. I had to resort to reinstalling a backup copy of my SSD and I then downloaded a previous version of SGPro and it is now playing ball.