What are the settings to use to prevent SGP from aborting a sequence when a few clouds pass by?? I prefer losing a few subs to clouds then losing an entire night for a couple minutes of clouds.
Turn on sequence recovery. You can set the recovery options to keep trying to recover the sequence every xx minutes over a certain amount of time that you set. (Tools/Options/Sequence Options) For example, you can have SGP attempt to recover every 10min for 90min. If the sequence doesn’t recover after 90min the sequence will abort and run end of sequence options. One thing to be aware of is that if recovery is triggered and the mount is on the east side (before meridian flip), the mount could potentially track west of the pier/tripod without doing a flip and have a pier crash. Most mounts have safeguards in place to prevent this, but that is outside of SGP.
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For every recovery attempt, will the mount be slewed and centered? If so then it may probably avoid pier clashing because mount will flip by itself.
No. If recovery does not reacquire a guide star from PHD first the sequence will not continue (and thus will not trigger a center action). So the mount will keep tracking.
However, I learned something new from the help file:
" Sequence Recovery Mode
With this feature in place it will be important to have tracking limits for your mount set that are external to SGPro (like in your ASCOM driver). Auto recovery means that your end of sequence options like “park” may be delayed by up to 90 minutes. Alternatively, the recovery feature will honor your [target end times] and sequence end time so you can use those to protect your mount as well. As a final note, it is important to know that sequence recovery will also abort when the mount crosses the meridian (SGPro will do this for safety)."
I was not aware of this last line. So it should be exceedingly rare that a pier crash happens during recovery. This must have changed at some point because I know from first hand experience (many moon ago) that a pier crash happened during recovery.
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I would prefer to keep SGP going than stopping the session when phd2 loses a star momentarily.
Hi, have the same problem with a few clouds over target.
The Recovery is set to try to recover for every 5 min.
But the problem is that, in case the guider lost the star, the ccd, mount is not paused and event is not restarted after the cloud is out.
It ends up with wrong target possition after the sequence is recovered.
Hi Joel,
I’m curious & I’ve read this a couple of times. Although pier crash’s cannot happen on my setup due to my mount\pier construction I was just thinking of what may be useful for others.
Upon unsafe conditions my mount parks, followed by the dome, flip-flat closes etc. Once conditions become safe the sequence restarts & continues no problem. The only real difference in my sequence options is I have the “Restart sequence when conditions are safe” ticked.
So would that setting alone guard against a potential pier crash for standard GEM users or have I misunderstood?
Just two other questions please.
Is there a way to prevent my camera from warming up upon unsafe conditions but still allow it to warm up at the end of the sequence?
It seems to me that the setting of the “Warm up when sequence completes” check box dictates the same behaviour for both scenarios.
And secondly is it possible to adjust the 5 minute delay (displayed conting down on the yellow bar) once safe conditions have been detected?