Hi All:
I’ve finally repaired my CGE Pro and am getting my observatory back in shape after the long house-building during COVID hiatus. What I’d started just before I was shut down was adding a second camera to my rig so I could easily swap back and forth or potentially even image both wide and narrow field simultaneously. I know I can run two instances of SGP and did that yesterday to capture a new set of darks on both cameras. Luckily QHY has two camera drivers in their kit and I only need the one mount, so I’m not subject to the limitation in this post. Even so, I could write a second ORO NexStar driver if I needed it to automate two mounts, and I do need to add a second instance of my homemade focuser driver to be able to run two instances there as well.
However, what I’m really needing to do is work through the one-at-a-time problem as, in ASCOM, the telescope specifications are included in the mount driver, instead of being separate from the mount. Thus, the specs on my OTA are always at the C11 even if I’m running the piggyback AT80LE. Oddly, however, the problem I was having last night was that while I can easily plate solve with the AT80LE and QHY247C, when I attempted to align to the much smaller QHY183C on the C11 OTA (which isn’t perfectly centered with the piggyback, and yes, that camera configuration is backwards from what I’d originally intended but I was doing wider fields than the 183C can handle), I could never get Astrometry.net to plate solve so I could align on my target. I don’t know if that’s because the stars are just too big on that small sensor or because SGP is feeding bad FOV information to the solver. It should be based on the C11, so that shouldn’t be a problem, but after trying everything I could think of, I finally just gave up and went to bed!
Any suggestions on how people set up for multiple camera configurations would be appreciated. ASCOM’s architecture obviously never really took this stuff into account.
Thanks,
Beo